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2011

Of trUction eraNts: On Benito Mussolini and Ezra

Pound

Andrew Durbin

Bard College

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Of trUction eraNts:

On Benito Mussolini and Ezra Pound

Senior Project submitted to

The Division of Languages and Literature

of Bard College

Andrew Durbin

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

November 2011

My study of Pound, Mussolini, and the Classics wouldn’t have been possible without the

unshakeable support of my advisor, Benjamin Stevens. Throughout this project he pushed

me to explore, interrogate, and think through this history and poetics in ways I couldn’t

have done alone. He, more than any other professor at Bard, has supported all of my

academic and extra-curricular endeavors, and for that I owe him many, many thanks. I

would also like to thank the entire Classics department, but especially Carolyn Dewald

and Bill Mullen, for always allowing me to do what I do, whatever that is.

The title of my senior project is from a line of Jackson Mac Low’s procedural erasure of

the Cantos, Words nd Ends for Ez, a book I discuss in the last chapter. Mac Low’s chance

procedure erased the original meaning (and shape) of Pound’s words, leaving only

fragments unloosed from their parent word and forced to hug the left-margin. I chose this

title precisely because the two key words in it lack any obvious meaning, because they

only make sense when the reader’s imagination attempts to restore them to their original

sense-context. Guesswork. I like that “truction” suggests both “destruction” and

“construction,” but also the sonic elision of “of structon” into “obstruction.” Anyone

who’s read Pound before understands the associations. “Erants” suggests both “errancy”

and “errantry.” Erring Ezra, Ezra-Errant, nds of construction or destruction. All these

possibilities in quasi-etymologies, ghosts of words haunting their original text. They ask

that you put them back. I want to try.

Mr. Owen Young made a mistake, he said the only thing he wished his son to have was

the power of clearly expressing his ideas. Not at all. It is not clarity that is desirable but

force.

—Gertrude Stein, Henry James

Contents

A poetics……………………………………………………………………………......…5

I. A Difficult Fusion………………………….……………………………………………7

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext……………………………………..21

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound………………..……………………...60

IV. Ez nd Ends…………………………………………………………………………...95

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………111

List of Figures……...…………………………………………………………………...115

A Poetics Durbin 5

(Figure 1)

Where does Rome go after Rome? It’s almost like the lyric of a song, only one none of us

would ever think to sing. Renovations begin when the building falls into disrepair, or

when those who live inside the building decide that the building must not fall into

disrepair. Some of us are living in Europe. There are many ruins around us, and they

remind us of ourselves when we were not around to see them before they needed

renovation. It is 1922. Can you tell me the difference between then and now? I sit in my

room staring at my computer screen, reading about how, in the most recent presidential

debate, the candidates discussed whether or not the government should be allowed to

mandate life-saving vaccinations. The debate is not about preventive medicine. It is not

1922 because that would be saying too much. Perhaps it is 1921. I have just written a

poem about myself and it ends with the lines, “This is how narratives build, / and this is

A Poetics Durbin 6

exactly how they built me.” Sometimes it is obvious that things never change, other times

it is obvious that they are only ever changing. You can’t step into the same river once, let

alone twice. Is that what we mean? It is 2011. I sit in my room staring at my computer

screen, and write the following sentence: “She gets up, moves to the front of the theater

to get a better view, and sits down.” She did not mean to go to the movies to see her lover

on the screen, and yet there he is—the new prime minister of Italy. What name would

you give him? I have just written a poem about you and it ends with the line, “History

repeats itself and asks for your money.” There are always questions, and they knock on

my door: Have you finished, and if so, have you finished as you’d planned? Tomorrow

morning it will be winter. What is the state of Europe? Ezra Pound writes his poem on

toilet paper, and some people sympathize with him. I am trying to sympathize with him.

Many of his friends are dead, including those who knew him best. Yes, they are alive and

can have those colors. Yesterday I got up, went out for coffee, and came back to read

Jackson Mac Low. I can’t read Jackson Mac Low. My friend Paul is trying to reconstruct

the Cantos using only the references parsed in Terrell’s Companion to the Cantos of Ezra

Pound. He calls it translation. It is hard for me to tell him that I can’t read his poems

because I feel “too close” to their ostensible subject, though I recognize that the one titled

“Enter the Void” is OK. There aren’t any clouds in the sky today. The river generally

flows from north to south. There is a portrait of Mussolini in one of my notebooks. It is

1883. The first hydroelectric plant has opened in Italy. This is what we might call the

beginning, unless you remember that the beginning always begins with Rome. It is easy

to travel up the Via Nazionale in the coffin of Anita Garibaldi. It is not easy to get out.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 7

A Difficult Fusion

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009)—a film about Benito Mussolini’s little-

known mistress (and possible additional wife), Ida Dalser and her eventual death in a

mental institution—has received an averaged score of 92% among critics on Rotten

Tomatoes, a movie database that aggregates a wide-range of movie reviews throughout

the United States and England.

Tom Long of the Detroit News writes in his

representative review that the film is “a passionate, bold look at power, paranoia and

betrayal in a little-known corner of history[.] Vincere is steamy, sad and so Italian it feels

like an opera.” While praise among English-language critics has been generally very

good, many have qualified their praise of the film. Jonathan Richards, a contributor to

Film.com, writes in his full review (complete reviews are hyperlinked on the site) that the

movie “is a wild ride of a movie, operatic in theme and style, sometimes flamboyant,

often murky, occasionally vaulting ecstatically into camp, and more than occasionally

turning incomprehensible as it scatters time frames and shuffles reality and illusion.”

Incoherence of style. is one of the most common criticisms made by critics of the film.

Jonathan Kiefer of the Sacramento News & Review writes, “It’s all a grand and flashy

affair—but also weirdly prone to the incoherence, redundancy and bullying

dehumanization that characterized the political history it presumes to critique.” The

apparent “incoherence” of the plot is probably due to its subtle shifts in time and imagery,

which Bellocchio achieves by splicing in newsreels from the 1920s and 30s. Neither

Rotten Tomatoes nor Metacritic (a similar website) account for Italian reviews of the

Among users of the site, the film has received a 61%.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 8

film, but enthusiasm for the film in continental Europe and Italy has been somewhat

similar to that in the U.S. In La Stampa, critic Lietta Tornabuoni praises the film for its

dynamic style and the actors’ performances: “un gran film diverso da tutti, innovativo,

dinamico, affascinante.” Although Gabriella Gallozi, writing in Unit, refers to the film’s

attempt to bridge its own images with historical footage as “una difficoltosa fusione,” she

does praise the film’s cinematographic and emotional complexities. Vincere was featured

at the 2009 Cannes film festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or, which it didn’t

win. That award went to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), a film that deals

with the late adolescence of the generation that would fight in the Second World War.

While Vincere isn’t a very impressive film, it makes some incidentally provocative points

on the problems of representing a figure like Mussolini, problems which were present

even in his contemporary moment.

Vincere is “weirdly prone to incoherence” for a number of reasons, few of which

the film seems to fully understand. While most critics were bothered by the confusing

elision of styles, especially of realism and opera, as well as its unclear commitment to

linear narrative (for the most part its arc is linear, only to occasionally dip into the past),

virtually no one has commented on the problem representation of Mussolini poses in the

first place. Most critics offered praise for Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s performance as Ida

Dalser,

but remained fairly silent on Filippo Timi’s role as both Mussolini and

Mussolini’s son with Dalser.

This is an interesting omission because the central problem

of the film for meseems to be Timi’s role as Mussolini and his son, and what it ultimately

She was considered for the Prix d'interprétation feminine, but the award went to

Charlotte Gainsbourg for her performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

Half way through the film Timi-Mussolini is replaced by newsreel footage of Il Duce.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 9

says about fictionalizing Mussolini. But there are a number of factors that might explain

this silence on the part of critics. For one, Timi looks nothing like Mussolini: his body

doesn’t match the dictator’s Napoleonic squareness nor does his face look anything like

Mussolini’s iconic one. Timi lacks the geometric symmetry and the physical robustness

of Mussolini’s features that made the image of Il Duce such an immediate, potent symbol

of Italian power—and Modernity. The sculptural quality of Mussolini’s features, which

simultaneously referenced the post-war art of the Italian avant-garde and its busy revival

of classicism as well as classical images of Roman emperors, and visually reinforced the

strength of Italy by providing a singular, physical analog to the country’s imperialist

ambitions. All of the referential qualities were articulated by fascist propaganda, and

were used to ensure Mussolini’s ubiquitous presence as political and cultural leader,

much like the Roman emperors he partially modeled his dictatorship after, especially

Caesar Augustus. For example, in conquered North Africa, the fascists carved a large

bust of Mussolini’s face in Algeria, suggesting not only his importance as the head of

Italian government (Il Capo, as Pound calls him in the Pisan Cantos), but also the

imagistic power of his features.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 10

Timi’s face is one of the crucial flaws in the film’s representation of Mussolini, one that

it complicates by replacing him half-way through the film with newsreel footage of

Mussolini. From thereon, documentary footage functions to represent the character of

Mussolini in the film. (At one point a crowd even “reacts” to the footage as though he

were there.) The film seems to hope that this stylistic decision will enact on screen the

historical transformation of Mussolini from the socialist to the militaristic nationalist by

replacing the Timi of softer, Technicolor features with the historic black and white

footage of the real Mussolini.

(Figure 2)

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 11

(Figure 3)

While this may be one part of the film’s point, the move is dissonant, and renders its

representative attempts somewhat flaccid. Instead of underscoring the powerful shift in

Mussolini, it draws attention to (through the contrast of original with documentary

footage) the inability of the film to portray Mussolini in as effective a manner as the

original footage does.

The operatic quality of the film underscores its own fictiveness in

trying to assimilate the documentary. The images of Mussolini easily overpower Timi,

and not only because they benefit from historical, non-fictive veracity, but because

Mussolini’s performance of himself is simply more captivating than Timi’s, who lacks

the simultaneous control and effortlessness of the real Il Duce. Mussolini’s physical

theatricality, which draws hyper-consciously on the popular images of national heroes (of

the Risorgimento and earlier), Roman emperors, and an Italian popular culture that he

was in part defining,

is simply beyond Timi’s abilities to replicate. Timi refers only to a

limited set of stereotyped behavioral ticks (the jutting chin, the clenched fists, the

By effective I don’t necessarily mean an “exact,” “historically accurate” performance

by an actor who looks identical to Mussolini, I mean rather an approach to this moment

in history, to the development of fascism, that fully addresses the psychological,

historical, and cultural realities that produced the conditions of the World War II. In this

sense, Haneke’s film, though it takes place before World War I, is a much more accurate

portrait of fascism’s career in power because its nuanced, psychological analysis of the

adolescence of those who would be responsible for the war doesn’t seek to imitate the

historical realities as such, but to approximate their conditions. This is a tricky argument

to make, especially with such limited space, but I hope that my paper’s exploration of the

complexities of Mussolini underscores my point that a direct, Hollywood-oriented

biographical representation of him is inadequate.

A defining that, as a series of massive, multi-valiant cultural acts carried out across

numerous media, generated what the historian Marla Stone refers to as the “hyperbolic

iconography” (209) of the fascist treatment of history, and in turn influenced much of

Mussolini’s performative readings of history. Stone also writes that what began as a

rhetorical strategy for legitimizing the fascist program into the national history quickly

transformed into an overwhelming kitsch—of art, architecture, film, and parades—by the

end of the fascist era.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 12

operatic aggression), and in this sense, Timi performs a performance, whereas Mussolini

simply performs.

More importantly, Bellocchio’s attempt to exploit the interplay

between his film’s own fictiveness and its use of documentary footage falls flat: the mix

of styles, the confusion of linear narrative, the literal play of shadows and light is so

overly cinematic that it is more or less rendered comical, its fictiveness is exposed in the

face of the real Mussolini, who is not only himself—historical and “real”—but a self

more adept at the use of these techniques than the film is. Mussolini is already a more

coherent interplay between modes of representation and discourse than the film, and the

film’s attempt to flatten him out ruptures the power of its own narrative. It is unable to

sustain itself as a coherent fiction, as a biographical, mostly realist “true” portrait of

Mussolini, because in its occasional attempts to de-fictionalize itself (and/or edge toward

the non-fictional) through the use of documentary footage it only draws the viewer’s

attention to the curious inadequacy of the film to realize its own project. Bellocchio seeks

to reinforce the quality of the “horror” and “revulsion” one feels at watching Mussolini

emotionally torture Dalser and rise to power because it happened. But precisely because

it happened, and because the film makes so much of the reality of its subject by way of

the subject himself, Vincere seems so curiously impotent. It remains just a movie,

whereas Mussolini remains, always, an historical fact, a fact in the lives of millions of

individuals.

It might be more helpful to think of the two performances as readings. Timi reads the

image of Mussolini and performs it, while Mussolini reads the “historic imaginary” of

Italy (in Claudio Fogu’s terms) in order to perform it. This is something that my thesis

will touch on later: Mussolini’s reading of Italian culture, and the ways a performance of

that reading shapes him both politically and culturally.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 13

In one early scene, Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser sits in a movie theater,

watching newsreel footage of the real Mussolini. The scene takes place shortly after

Mussolini has been asked by King Victor Emmanuel III on 29 October 1922 to form a

new government following the final collapse of the leftist government. After a summer of

deep internal division and brutal pressures from fascist gangs the left collapsed. The rise

of Mussolini and fascism culminated in the famous “March on Rome” on the day of

inauguration as prime minister, finalizing both symbolic and actual fascist rule. The left

lost its popular support, and many leftist activists were jailed, killed, or coerced into

political inactivity (Sprigge 204). In the film, the camera is first trained on Mezzogiorno

as she sits in a dark theater. Within seconds her face is obscured by men who have

suddenly stood up. She gets up, moves to the front of the theater to get a better view, and

sits down. The scene is switched to an angle behind the audience, all of whom have

raised their hands in fascist salute to an unclear black and white film in the background.

The camera returns to Mezzogiorno, who stands and turns around, the camera following

her, to face the audience. Immediately behind her, with the camera pointed up from

somewhere around her waist, looms the enormous movie screen with the film of

Mussolini. In the footage, Mussolini stands in a crowd with King Emmanuel III, though

quickly that film switches to a close-up of Il Duce’s head. Mezzogiorno is overshadowed

in the right-hand corner of the screen while the real Mussolini surveys whatever scene

lies before him. His enormous head and the intensity of his features—especially his

strong jawline, slightly protruding mouth, enormous Roman nose, and deep-set eyes—

stand in stark contrast to Mezzogiorno.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 14

(Figure 4)

The effect of this scene is chilling, as it signals the shift in the medium of Dalser’s

interactions with her lover. She is no longer permitted to see him in a way that would

allow her to touch him, and Fillipo Timi switches from playing Mussolini to Mussolini’s

son, completing the film’s own estrangement from its subject. The film drops the

fictiveness of Timi’s performance as soon as it introduces historical footage of Il Duce.

Vincere forgoes its own authority to perform and interpret history in the face of the

reality it attempts to replicate. But this shift, problematic as it is for the film’s coherency,

isn’t so much a surrender as it is an (incidental/accidental?—it’s unclear) recognition of

the primacy of the image of Mussolini in the first place, the inability of any secondary

source to reproduce it. Perhaps Bellocchio recognizes the complex system of symbols

and meanings that developed around Mussolini and his film’s inability to adequately

contain this multitude of meanings, as Mussolini was essentially programmed to be

irreducible. The ubiquity of his face and the fascist liturgy that enshrined and organized

around him, if only symbolically, essentially restricts access to definition—to the act of

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 15

defining. The films, literature, visual arts, museums, parades, academies, and architecture

of fascist Italy—from before anno uno

to Mussolini’s downfall in 1943—created a

matrix of historical references, suggestions, meanings, and gestures around Mussolini,

partially orchestrated by Mussolini himself, so replete with variegated meanings that it

essentially created both an opportunity to select an image of Il Duce and an overly-

complex trap for those who attempted to represent the whole of him. The image of Il

Duce legitimized itself by borrowing from the potent symbolism of the ancient past of

Rome and the nineteenth century popular unification movement, the Risorgimento, a

symbolism that was already predicated on skewed, politically convenient interpretations

in order to quickly normalize both fascism and Mussolini into the national history, and

exclude all outside attempts, like that of non-state endorsed artists, to participate in the

process of interpretation and the manufacture of meaning. Vincere, in its uneasy and

ultimately self-negating use of found footage, raises this question as to what makes

Mussolini such a complex figure, and what that complexity means for any attempt to

categorize him.

Mussolini not only appeared at the intersections of hundreds of meanings, but was

constituted by the intersection itself. While the development of this system of meanings

unfolded across many media, discourses, and locations, its central aesthetic object gained

particular traction in the arts largely because Mussolini so actively sought to make

himself the center of Italian Modernism. As a Modernist-Futurist, he was the platform the

West could use to launch into the mechanized future of F.T. Marinetti (before Marinetti

In 1927, the Fascists created a new calendar that identified October 29

as the start of

the New Year. Nineteen twenty-two was also renamed year one (Falasca-Zampoi 1). The

various newspapers at the time ran the two measurements of time alongside one another.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 16

became disillusioned by the dictator’s commitment to antiquity

). As an image of

Classical power, he was the most substantial bridge to the past for the art critic

Margherita Sarfatti. For Antonio Monti and many other Italians, the renowned curator of

the Museum of Risorgimento in Milan, he was Il Duce taumaturgo—the leader who

would finish the Risorgimento (a narrative seized and reinvented by fascism in the 1920’s

and 30’s) and heal the country after it’s pyrrhic victory in World War I. The difficulty of

representing Mussolini has been treated by a number of Italian filmmakers, especially

Federico Fellini, whose autobiographical films often address the mercurial, but

ubiquitous presence of Mussolini in Italian life. But perhaps the artist who most

significantly “fell for”—and even contributed to—the complex image system that

surrounded Mussolini was the American poet Ezra Pound, who devoted much of his

energies in the 1920’s and 30’s to Italian fascism as a cultural figure, theorist, radio

broadcaster, and poet, especially in his long, refractory poem, The Cantos, which features

Mussolini as one its heroes for much of the first half of the poem. For Ezra Pound he was

the virtuous Confucian leader capable of reorganizing corrupted contemporary society in

an orderly utopia, the anti-thesis to a system of banking and government geared toward

endless war, an analog to Jefferson, and an epic hero with countless historical

antecedents. In a word, the symbolic potency of Mussolini, the field of (as opposed to

individual of) visual and textual discourse that he became, yielded countless significant,

Kenneth E. Silver writes in his essay “A More Durable Self:” “Although his bellicose,

nationalist avant-garde movement had much that was congenial to the Fascists,

[Marinetti’s] stance against what he considered Italy’s cult of the past—‘the annoying

memory of Roman greatness,’ as he wrote—condemned Futurism to history”(31).

Generally the Futurists opposed the fascist appropriation of the Rome of antiquity. Emilio

Settimelli dismissed Mussolini’s Roman ambitions as “an act of restoration of

plagiarism” (Settimelli 274). See also the writings of Giuseppe Prezzolini, whose book

Fascism I will return to later.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 17

culturally generative responses—positive, negative, or ambivalent—during the fascist

“moment” and later. And as Bellocchio’s film demonstrates, the question of

representation of Mussolini remains important today, especially in Italy, where politicians

like (recently ousted) prime minister Silvio Berlusconi continue to draw on the

authoritative image of Mussolini in constructing their own.

Many of these artists and thinkers, especially Ezra Pound, found it difficult to

represent Mussolini, to participate in the discourse of power without estranging

themselves from the center of power. In Vincere, from the movie theater scene onward,

Bellucchio mixes his film with the documentary footage: as Benito Albino (Mussolini’s

son), Timi “attends” a rally of Mussolini’s where the dictator screams various invocations

to the power of Italy and its rightful place as successor to the Roman Empire; later Albino

is committed to psychiatric hospital, like his mother, and Bellucchio interweaves images

of Albino imitating his father with those of the actual Mussolini as an attempt to criticize

Mussolini’s public persona as mad, but also as, I think, a comment on the film’s tortured

attempt at representation. Finally, the film ends by returning to the opening scene in

which Dalser watches Mussolini “confront” the authority of God in a public debate in a

small town (Timi isn’t shown). The final shot of the film is of found footage of a bust of

Mussolini being crushed by a machine. The estrangement the film enacts—the

recognition of its failure to provide a Mussolini as powerful as the original (if because of

its fictiveness)—is at the center of Ezra Pound’s relationship to Mussolini in The Cantos,

and his desire to gain access to the symbolic histories and imaginary Mussolini patrolled.

The estrangement is essential to how Pound conceived of Mussolini in his poem, and

perhaps even shaped, re-shaped, and directed the form of the poem, exploded its political,

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 18

philosophical, and poetical concerns beyond what Pound initially conceived in the first

drafts. In this thesis I will trace some of these developments.

The uneven relationship between Pound and Mussolini can be understood, in part,

as an uneven relationship between Pound’s poem and Mussolini’s symbolic self. While it

is popular among Pound critics to separate the man from his poem, and to further parcel

out the fascist from the non-fascist elements, this critical approach creates both an escape

from the ethical quandary of reading, appreciating, and criticizing Pound and distracts

from the dimensionality of the poem. The fascist question in Pound is, for me, a formal

one: to what extent do the Cantos, which take fascist political ideology as at least one

starting point, reflect in their poetics the environment that produced them? To perform a

reading of Pound that recuperates, repudiates, or re-imagines Pound’s fascism as divisible

from other parts of the work or the man says less about Pound than it does about the

reader. In fact, much of the Pound industry (especially in Hugh Kenner and Carroll

Terrell) is about the expiation of Pound’s sins rather than an exploration of them and their

causes. This is also true for readings that simply dismiss him because he was a fascist—a

less common, but nevertheless occasional approach to his work. The critic and Language

poet Bob Perelman, whose book Trouble with Genius was one of the points of origin for

this essay, probably comes close to falling under this category. But the extent to which

Pound’s fascism reflects a formal interest has been underexplored, and I think it is in this

locus, at the intersection of Pound’s historical-poetic-cultural interests with fascism’s,

that we can come to a better understanding of Pound as an individual thinking through a

perceived ethical and historical dilemma, rather than as an as a poet divisible from his

compromised ethics.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 19

Before I draw out the dimensionality of Mussolini in Pound, I want to first

suggest a revision in how I’ve written about Mussolini in the previous paragraphs. For

one, I want to drop any discussion of Mussolini as a “man,” that is, as an individual of

flesh and blood, one with personal, psychological motives (the Mussolini of Bellocchio)

in favor of the Mussolini as the intersection of visual and textual discourse, as a symbolic

imaginary, that he became for his follows and the fascist movement—and for Pound

himself. In a word, I am interested in Il Duce, in a man whose primary presence in his

country’s mind was not as an individual or an individual leader, but as a text, a living

hypertext, a text composed purely of linkages, of reference and gesture to multiple Italian

histories, to both Classical and avant-garde arts, to Augustus as well as the four heroes of

the Risorgimento. This is not to fully discredit the importance of Mussolini’s biography

and its influence on his politics, but to table them as essentially unimportant in their

influence on Pound. What matters for the Cantos is the image of Il Duce, and how Pound

worked from that, however much he claims to “know” Mussolini. The formal principles

that underwrite Pound’s poem—the all inclusive, revision of multiple histories that are

occurring at once—are similar to Il Duce’s, and reflect, in part, Mussolini himself. Like Il

Duce, Pound is primarily interested in the re-interpretation of history in order to construct

a new image of it, to not only include history and its particulars, but to revise it into a

coherent narrative that proposes a better future. Pound places Mussolini at the center of

the first half of his Cantos as one epic hero, and uses the poem to idealize and enact

Giovanni Gentile’s Actualism of making the past “present” in contemporary Italy in

language and poetry. If Il Duce was a living hypertext, then Pound’s Cantos is the textual

analog.

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 20

By conducting much of cultural discourse from the late nineteen-teens to 1943,

from patronage of the arts and museums to the numerous parades and speeches he gave

during his tenure as prime minister, Mussolini as a living hypertext, as Il Duce, enabled

his listeners and viewers to access histories and traditions of their choosing in their

reading of him. For some he was a Futurist symbol of the mechanized future, for others a

Roman emperor. For Pound, he was an epic hero capable of reshaping history, of

enacting the historicist vision of Gentile of a leader who could make action and thought

one. Pound’s poem reflects a similar interest, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the

poem we have was revised from an earlier, somewhat different project after he met the

fascists. It wasn’t until after Pound encountered the fascists that the ambitious, poem

including history began to take shape in Pound’s mind. Nor do I think that Pound’s need

to re-strategize his compositional practice after the Pisan Cantos, when his poem’s living

analog was no longer alive, is an accident. Pound writes in Guide to Kulchur, “The

history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action” (GK 40). I’m interested in the

ways in which Mussolini was, like Pound’s history of a culture, a set of ideas going to

into action, and how that plays out as a formal influence on Pound’s criticism and poems

from the 1920’s to the 40’s. The trace that links them is not tenuous, nor is it obvious,

which is in keeping with Pound’s general elliptical tribute to influence and animus. In the

following chapters, I hope to meditate on fascism, the way it constructed (and

deconstructed) history, transformed Mussolini from a political leader to a cult-literary

object, and how this influenced Pound’s poetics in the Cantos. Through this study, I also

hope to draw some loose, but nevertheless present connections between the ancient past

and its political, cultural, and aesthetic context that so strongly influenced the political

I. A Difficult Fusion Durbin 21

and cultural movements of the early 20

century. Neither Pound nor Mussolini could

have existed or worked in the world without the Classical tradition to draw on, re-

interpret, and revise.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 22

Mussolini Rising:

Reading Il Duce as Hypertext

In order to understand Mussolini as a living hypertext interpenetrated by

numerous cultural, political, and historical discourses, the animus of the political context

that produced him must be first traced back to the early 1880s. It is important to stress the

degree to which Mussolini didn’t emerge out of thin air, but rather arrived at a moment

that was very much the culmination of nearly a century of political strife. Though the

origins of fascism reach farther than the nineteenth century, I am primarily interested in

the immediate history that preceded Italian fascism, because it was the history it directly

responded to, even if many of its philosophical tenants began in Rome. However, the

degree to which this era propagandized itself as a revival of the Rome of antiquity is

important to the way Mussolini and the fascists figured themselves as rulers. In many

ways, this narrative became extremely important in their attempts to normalize fascism in

Italian history, and lead directly to Mussolini’s transcendent status as an intersection of

discourse.

For fascism to rise, socialism had to first decline, a narrative which begins with

the industrialization of Italy at the end of the 19

century. While fascist ideology can be

traced well-before the Industrial revolution, the most immediate historical crux that

allowed for the cultural conditions that eventually allowed it to emerge as the dominant

political force in the newly united Italian state can be traced back to the 1880s. Northern

Italy, where the political right was located, rapidly embraced the industrial technologies

and modes of production already popular and successful in Western Europe, starting with

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 23

Milan in 1883 with the opening of the first hydro-electric plant in Italy.

The left, based

largely in the south, was sluggish to acclimate to the cultural, financial, and mechanical

transformation of the country, and struggled throughout the nineteen-teens to remain

relevant in national politics, especially as it continued to be relatively rural and artisanal.

By the end of the first decade of the century, the inhabitants of the teeming industrial

cities of the north boasted a 26% increase in wages and shorter work hours while the rest

of the country saw only a 16% rise, broadening the divide between the two halves of the

country. (Forgacs 30-31.)

By 1899, with the opening of the first Fiat plant, and continuing into the first

decade of the twentieth century, northern Italy became a center for automobile

production. Other industries, like steel, sugar, arms, textiles, and banking quickly

industrialized, and in doing so, expanded their influence on Italian culture and politics.

Crucially, the industrialization process tightened the relationship between emergent big

business and the Italian financial system, which in turn increased and broadened the

political activities of many of the major industrialists. Whereas before industrialization

the Italian market was largely localized and independent of major financial structures, the

Italy of the early twentieth-century reorganized production such that it became

increasingly dependent on the state and the rest of Europe. Because the right favored big

business in legislation, these activities leaned mostly to right-wing causes. David Forgacs

writes in his study on Italy during the Industrial era,

The convergences between industry and financed also involved a

tightening of links with the political system. This was both because the

state became involved in the expansion of modern sectors of the economy,

It is no accident that Milan, which continued to lead the industrial revolution in Italy,

produced both the Futurists and Mussolini.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 24

given that a large domestic market did not exist, and also because

politicians were linked to particular banks …, particular sectors of

industry…, and the particular economic policy orientations. (31)

The industrialization of other major sectors of Italian life, especially the newspapers,

book publishing, and the theater (as transformed into/by the cinema), also increased the

political activities of the (primarily) right wing industrialists. Unlike the previous political

and financial elite, this new set did not necessarily emerge out of the ruling aristocratic

class, which had been mostly supportive of the socialist rule of Giovanni Giolitti. In fact,

one of the most significant transformations industrialization produced in Italian culture,

and one that had arguably the most immediate impact on the support structures of both

the right and left, was the newspaper industry, an industry that had formerly supported

the socialists.

The influence of industry through newspapers was felt locally at first, but

substantially. By the early part of the century, most papers operated at a loss, facing

“spiraling costs and continued low returns” (Forgacs 24). Seeing an opportunity for

raising public support for industrialization, major industrialists gained considerable

political leverage by financing and revitalizing the local newspapers.

By providing

The Italian newspaper production and distribution system was largely based on local

efforts, which meant that most papers did not have significant political power outside

their localities. No Italian paper except perhaps Il Corriere della Sera, which underwent

tremendous financial and political renovations at the hands of cotton industrialist

Benigno Crespi, was distributed outside of the city it was produced in. Until the 1980s,

Italian newspapers also had considerably lower subscription rates when compared to

Western Europe and the United States, due in part to low literacy rates. Because of the

small reading public, papers before industrialization made little effort to appeal to

constituencies other than the cultural and political elite. This made them into much more

lucrative investment opportunities for the major industrialists, who saw the papers as the

perfect site for closed-door political activism. See David Forgacs helpful table of the

shareholding interests of the major newspapers [39] to observe the extent to which

industry had controlling interests in the medium.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 25

capital to these struggling papers, industrialists were able to gain considerable control

over editorial policies. Under this modernization and revitalization process of the papers,

the industries expanded their political clout and raised local interest in promoting

industrial interests. Mussolini’s extremely popular and pro-war paper Il Popolo d’Italia,

for example, raised its start capital in part through the efforts of several industrialists who

would have (and did) benefit from the First World War (Forgacs 36), Mussolini started

the paper after he was expelled from the Socialist party, and used it as a platform for

launching his political career as well as the fascist movement. After several papers

reversed their support of the left (most notably Il Resto del Carlino), the socialists opened

an official inquiry into the funding behind several papers in an effort to increase financial

transparency. But this new public light did nothing to slow the political transformation of

the papers. Rather, all efforts to halt the right’s industrial-financial gains only further

stultified support for the left, as most Italians began to see them as opposed to progress

and therefore economic parity with Western Europe. Unlike socialism, “Fascism, despite

ideological contradictions within it as a movement, ultimately appeared to guarantee a

protective political framework for the dominant classes, who therefore transferred their

support of it” (Forgacs 53). Even the lower classes of northern Italy saw increased

benefits under the fascist-support industrialization process, with increased wages and

fewer work hours, thus effecting a similar, widespread political shift in the northern

lower classes. The crippling factory strikes of the late nineteen-teens only further

diminished the appeal of socialism.

The First World War, which the right supported and the left was incapable of

preventing, proved more financially costly and emotionally taxing than anticipated, even

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 26

by those who opposed it in the first place. In domestic politics, confidence in a leftist

government diminished in the fallout of the pyrrhic and somewhat embarrassing victory

of the Italians. Although the left voiced the greatest opposition to the war, it struggled to

“spin” the outcome of the complicated, unsatisfying victory. The right (lead in part by

Mussolini) on the other hand immediately transferred blame for the various humiliations

that accompanied the war on the left, largely through the newspapers. Support for the

socialists among veterans—a crucial and vocal demographic after the war—never

recovered. Mussolini’s successful repackaging of the dramatic defeat at Caporetto as a

result of socialist malfunction could perhaps be seen as the final assurance of the death of

an effective non-fascist or right-wing political framework in Italy until after the Allied

occupation.

The 1917 battle and subsequent defeat at Caporetto, a city that lies along the

northern border of the country, created within Italian national culture a crisis of identity

that lead directly to the ascent of fascism—and Mussolini. The battle was fought between

the allied forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary and the second Italian army, and lasted

from October 24 to November 19 of that year. The German and Austria-Hungarian

offensive was relentless in its use of poison gas, and the second Italian army, already

considerably weakened by previous engagements with the Central Powers, collapsed,

leaving Italy open to a total invasion. Logistical failures on the part of the Central Powers

prevented them from entering Italy, and a war of attrition ensued until they retreated back

to the Piave river, where they were later turned back in the Battle of Vittorio Venetto.

(Clark 223-4.) Regardless of the later success, the battle took on an enormous character in

the Italian popular imagination. Quoting the scholar Elvio Fachinelli, Claudio Fogu, who

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 27

I have found to be one of the most insightful thinkers on the philosophical tenants that

underwrite Italian fascism, argues that this event was fundamental “in the formation and

early mass appeal of fascist ideology,” largely because it was viewed as a failure of

socialism to protect a homeland only recently stitched together after centuries of conflict.

He writes, “[D]uring the three months of retreat that followed the defeat at Caporetto,

there rose an ‘image of an endangered fatherland, dead or under deadly threat,’ which

spread rapidly throughout the home front” (Fogu 44). This image persisted well into the

post-war, and became a defining feature of Italian popular consciousness—and the right

quickly propagandized it as a failure of the left in order to undermine socialist authority

and popularity.

This particular threat—of the loss of a unified Italy—was especially dramatic

after the Risorgimento (the “Resurgence”) of the nineteenth century that had finally

unified Italy. This popular movement, which I’ll return to momentarily, was a source of

considerable national pride, and functioned as a rallying point for most Italians, as many

saw it as a restoration of their culture to its rightful place in Europe. The success of the

Central Powers’ relatively brief offensive threatened to expose old wounds and, more

importantly, to render the century of conflict and pain entirely pointless. This moment

also produced in the populace a desire for a much stronger national defense and

government structure, one that could fend off the threats of its northern neighbors and

compete with them economically. Immediately following the war, Italians began to look

to their own national history and character for the source of this new Italy.

While

In his Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton lists “a sense of overwhelming crisis

beyond the reach of any traditional solutions” as the first of his “mobilizing passions”

beyond fascist movements (Paxton 41). And indeed, no traditional solution was the fix

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 28

victory enabled Italy to cling to some hope that this was possible, victory alone could not

to assuage the public fear that Italy was unprotected and exposed. As the fascists (and

their predecessors, the Futurists) believed, Italy would require an ideological and cultural

shift in order to secure its national borders and, by extension, its culture. The war

produced a need for a new philosophy of history and a new kind of Italian leader.

Mussolini, who was both politically agile and conscious of the cultural vulnerabilities

that emerged in the public space after the war, would eventually emerge as this new

leader, Il Duce—Futurist, philosopher, Roman emperor, artist, work of art, hypertext: a

figure not only representative of the power of the state, but of its culture. A figure around

which culture could swarm, and re-orient itself. For a country recently made vulnerable

by a newly mechanized Europe, Mussolini was a blank slate upon which they could write

any hope for a stronger Italy. Adrian Lyttelton writes in his essay “Italian Fascism,”

[Mussolini’s] complex and contradictory personality, and his instability of

aim allowed a variety of different groups to project their hopes upon him[,

even though he] had little capacity for long-range planning, and for all his

brilliance as a political tactician in the really serious crises of his political

career, he often proved himself hesitant and vacillating. (147).

While I wouldn’t necessarily characterize Mussolini’s actions as “vacillating,” a word

which suggests too much accidence and indecisiveness, I would argue that his actions

could be seen as “oscillating,” a verb that seems to suggest more, though still limited

agency. As a figure in Italian politics, Mussolini consciously oscillated between actions

in order to appear as so much to so many—at once. In this regard, the Italian people and

those who supported him, like Pound, could graph their various political ideologies and

precisely because the traditional solution—a unified Italy—was itself at the center of the

crisis. Instead, Italians sought a blend of the new, the Modernist, and the old, the

classical.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 29

interests onto his, and even ascribe to him any number of motives. Mussolini realized this

in part through a conscious activation of certain histories within Italy. But before Il Duce

could emerge, a philosophical groundwork had to be set in place.

(Figure 5. Mussolini speaks to a crowd)

In response to the historian Benedetto Croce, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile

proposed a philosophical program of historiography that would prove especially

attractive to the fascists and Mussolini at this time: that history can be retrieved from the

past and made “present.” For Gentile, any act can potentially be invested with a historical

character, can have consequences such that history is re-oriented toward it, made actual

in the present—a philosophical wager he called Actualism.

As Claudio Fogu writes in

his book The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy,

There are echoes of this kind of thinking in T.S. Eliot’s near-contemporary essay,

“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Focusing on the way the present can be used to re-

orient history, Eliot argues a somewhat similar view of literary history. Eliot writes, “The

existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the

introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is

complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 30

From the point of view of [A]ctualism, reading a history book, a historical

document, or a historic event were all activities belonging to the

transtemporal presence of experience. Because we can never transport

ourselves to the past, we can always make that pas attuale (actual) by

thinking its content within ‘our present awareness of thinking ourselves

thinking the object.’ (38)

In his Actualist manifesto, Gentile includes the central maxim of the intellectual

movement: “L’atto del pensare come atto puro”—the act of thinking as a pure act.

Gentile’s philosophy was primarily interested in the translation of thought into action

through reading, a theory he later revised to include engagement with the performance or

spectacle of history—a tacit sanction of Mussolini’s public performance of the histories

of Rome in his various commemorations, speeches, and parades. In his book Fascism,

Giuseppe Prezzolini, an Italian writer who lived through the period, quotes from some of

Gentile’s writings on Actualism written after the March on Rome, a period which

privileges a mystical presence of history in the subject: “Let us quit the books, then, and

consider the spirit of the deeds which throughout history have meant so much more to us

than any expounded doctrines” (F 99). For Gentile, historical consciousness could be

“performed” publically. Further clarifying Gentile’s position on history, Fogu writes,

Actualism [is] the syntactical subjectification of objects, or the semantic

contamination of philosophical and religious language, or the translation

of rhetorical analogy into catastrophe, or the grammatical activation of

select nouns into predicates: from ‘fact’ to ‘acting,’ from ‘philosophy’ to

‘filosofare’ (to do philosophy). At the root of the [A]ctualist imaginary we

novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,

proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is

conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the

form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should

be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (38). Because of

the importance of this essay to the development of literary Modernism, and the possible

influence Pound had on Eliot’s thinking, I will return to a discussion of this passage and

others in the next chapter.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 31

thus find the quintessentially modernist utopia of a self-generating actant

(Fogu 46).

Actualism was a phenomenon in historiography that pretended to have real-world

consequences. With Actualism, Gentile responded to the emergence of both Futurism,

with its call for Europe to embrace the technologies of war as an avenue to the future, as

well as the ancient past. Gentile, like other fascists, saw in Italian culture an enormous

discontinuity between Rome and contemporary Italy, and he attempted to straddle the

dividing line between the Futurists and Rome by developing a historiography (and

eventually a cultural) practice that could resuscitate Rome and transport it to the fascist

moment. For Gentile, Fogu writes, the moment of reading acts as site for the absorption

of historical particulars that could reshape and reorient one to the other, enacting at that

moment a shift within the subject that enables him/her to bring history within them,

dissolving “the medium of representation between thinking and writing into a historical

self-generation” (39). This, in turns, creates subjects who are thinking about their daily

life in a fascist context in terms of a transcendent history, like that of ancient Rome,

creating for Mussolini a convenient space to define much of his government’s actions in

terms of the Roman Empire. This philosophy of history was also a more generally

convenient tool for fascism because it proposed a philosophical and historicizing praxis

that could be used to normalize fascism in Italian history through its public spectacles.

According to Gentile’s Actualism, fascism’s performance of its power was generated out

of history itself, and therefore “more legitimate” than the left, which over-relied on

contemporary (and therefore transient), self-interested in politics.

The somewhat hidden, but crucial relationship between Gentile’s Actualism and

Mussolini’s fascism is especially obvious in the image of the two provided by the Italian

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 32

Encyclopedia, which was complied by fascist intellectuals in 1932. The entry on

“Fascism” was signed by Mussolini (and was later expanded “by” Mussolini as an essay

titled “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism”), but it was written by Gentile. The

entry is arguably the most important of his writings because it reveals the way in which

power (=Mussolini) appropriated Actualism in its self-definition for a large, public

audience. Central to this fiction was fascism’s own mythos, and the way it used that

mythos to construct itself as a fundamentally Italian political phenomenon. Fascism was

not exclusively the culmination of an intellectual tradition, rather it was a tradition

(extending back to Rome) inherent in the Italian political system. Fascism was always

there, it only needed to be fully realized by Mussolini and his allies. In fact, for the

fascists fascism was never an ideology, rather it was a political system more directly

related to reality than any other before it. Gentile writes in the entry, “Fascism was not

the nursling of a doctrine worked out beforehand with detailed elaboration; it was born of

the need for action and it was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical”

(Gentile 288). Like the Risorgimento and Rome, which were Italian “moments” rather

than ideologies (or, in the least, so large and wide-ranging as to be seen as beyond

ideology), fascism was the next phase of Italian history, one so important that it required

a reset of the calendar. In the 1930s, the Italians adopted a new calendar. While it was

semi-optional (most newspapers chose to run the date beside the Gregorian calendar, and

many private citizens (including Ezra Pound on occasion) used the date in their letters.

The new system remained in place until 1943.

Gentile was one of the leading thinkers at the time, and his suggestion that

Rome—the ultimate and most potent symbol of Italian strength—could be brought into

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 33

modernity was aimed precisely at inviting fascist appropriation of his ideas, especially as

Mussolini and the fascists began to participate in the broad culture of Classicism that

attended European Modernism. For Gentile, Rome was a symbol of pure action, one that

could be integrated into the fascist image after the war and used for political leverage

against the left. The end of the war, and the decline of the left, became the perfect outlet

for massive political and intellectual change in Italy. Fogu writes, “Quite literally, Gentile

read the Italian victory in the Great War as the historical sign of a collective reorientation

of the historical imagination toward history belonging to the present” (Fogu 42). But as

far as a larger philosophical project, one that could be developed within media across the

spectrum of Italian culture, Gentile and the fascists were only interested in select

histories, specifically that of Rome of the Caesars and the Risorgimento, and even more

specifically in their own selective readings of history. For the emergent fascist

movement, the negotiation of these two symbolic, overlapping histories of the Italian

state was central to broadening the appeal of their movement, and for transforming

Mussolini from politician into the central junction in culture at which the numerous

symbols, histories, and images of the Italy of the past and present were attached,

manipulated, reinterpreted, assaulted, redefined, and remade. While an enormous amount

of agency can be ascribed to Mussolini, his ability to emerge as a living hypertext, as

someone with such a central, privileged access to power, its representation, and its ability

to represent, was largely due to the extent to which Italian culture was frayed and

destabilized by the war, and the left’s political fortunes ruined by industrialization.

While ascent can be credited in part to Mussolini’s negotiation of the Italian

imaginary through an Actualist mode of historiography (and historical engagement),

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 34

especially in the wake of the postwar, the conditions of the fascist rise were not entirely

grounded in philosophical discontent. The rise of Italian fascism in both political and

national life was extremely quick, especially once a figure capable of uniting its different,

widespread, and at times contradictory factions—Mussolini, Il Duce—emerged. The

fascist movement gained traction as a quasi-national movement at the end of the

nineteen-teens when Mussolini militarized his supporters (Paxton 58) in the face of

ongoing socialist workers strikes, though its influence was still predominately limited to

the industrialized north. Although most of the fascist gains that were made at the expense

of the socialists came out of a brutal ethic of intimidation, their ability to cripple the

socialist apparatus was certainly helped by their clever manipulation of history following

the war. The permanence of the fascist political capital was insured by their interest in the

narrative of their movement and its place in Italian history, and Mussolini took an active

role in narrating his political achievements as a necessary next step in Italian history. In

fact, central to the fascist revolution was the revolution in narrative, one that rewrote

much of the history that preceded it.

The trauma of war produced in Italian culture a widespread desire for a new

leadership that could “heal” its wounds—and for, as was made explicit in much of the

propaganda at the time, a pharmacon to fix Italy. The future curator of the Museum of the

Risorgimento in Milan, one of the most important sites for reconciling the fascist present

with the Risorgimento past, Antonio Monti, first expressed this “collective expectations”

in April 1920, when he anonymously wrote an article, “Museums of Suffering,” calling

for anti-war “museums of suffering” to commemorate the war dead (Fogu 52). This

article was about a scarred war veteran boarding a tram car, and the subsequent bourgeois

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 35

disgust at his appearance. While no such museums were ever constructed, the scope of

the Museum of the Risorgimento was expanded (after much internal debate) to include

the First World War. Monti’s curatorship at the Risorgimento Museum crucially elevated

his place in the construction of the fascist narrative, and instantly made him an asset to

the fascist party. In his curatorship, Monti was responsible for (re)constructing (through

various exhibits) the Risorgimento for popular consumption, and was extremely

important in presenting fascism as an extension of the unification movement. This

involved exhibits, the arrangement and collection of material, the establishment of the

criteria for what constitutes an artifact of Risorgimento history, and documents detailing

the history of the movement—and, operating after Gentile, this collection stressed the

presentness of history, focusing on personal documents to chronicle the 19

century that

were familiar and tactile. The narrative was mostly told through soldiers’ letters and

small, personal objects. As one of the nation’s authority on the Risorgimento, Monti’s

support of Mussolini was crucial—and helped to initiate his transformation into icon,

hero, and centerpiece of the Italian imaginary. In 1930 Monti revised the image of the

wounded veteran in a second open letter to include the very pharmacon the country had

been seeking: Mussolini. In the (signed) article, “Mussolini’s Caress to the War

Archive,” the wounded veteran is no longer the object of scorn, but rather the subject of

Mussolini’s loving and healing caress during his 1923 visit to Milan as prime minister

(Fogu 53). The soldiers weeps tears of gratitude. This image is especially important

because it stresses the degree to which a focus on the renewal of Italian life became a

focus on Mussolini, and the extent to which that focus was transformed by, and

transformed, Il Duce.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 36

This first Mussolini, Il Duce taumaturgo, as Fogu describes him, appealed so

firstly because it “foregrounds the crucial role that Catholic imagery played in encoding

these expectations” in the great healer in Italy.

More importantly, Il Duce taumaturgo

became a salient image that “pointed explicitly to the founding interaction between the

formation of fascist historic imaginary and the popular cult of Mussolini.” This Mussolini

was newly resilient, an image of resistance against the forces opposed to Italy and to its

own inner weaknesses. The left, led by Giolitti, was incapable of producing a figure of

similar mass appeal who could also successively generate the symbolic linkages between

the various factors of Italian life required in the post-war. Giolitti and the socialists

appeared slow, resistant to change, or worse, opposed to it, and therefore to a strong Italy.

(Fogu 54-55.) They also lacked the charisma that was so essential to Mussolini’s appeal.

In fact, the most significant opposition Mussolini faced came from within the fascist

movement itself. Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was initially much more famous than

Mussolini, and had a wider support base in the party. But D’Annunzio, who was known

for his decadence, lyric poetry, and dandyism, was easily branded as too-nineteenth

century to lead a post-war Italy. After flubbing the occupation at Fiume, D’Annunzio

quickly lost the support of both the fascists and of Giolitti’s government. After 1922,

when he was pushed from a window in an apparent assassination attempt, D’Annunzio’s

retired from politics to Vittoriale, near Salò, where he continued to write poetry until his

death in 1938 (Bosworth 146).

Until the mid-1920s, the Catholic Church was reluctant to participate in fascism on an

official level (though most Catholic publications had already backed Mussolini and the

fascists, seeing, in part, the potential for him as a figure of reconciliation in the aftermath

of the war). However, by 1926 Church officials realigned the church to the fascist state,

maintaining a complicit relationship with Mussolini until the collapse of his regime. Of

course, within the Church structure there was a tremendous amount of dissent.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 37

After D’Annunzio’s political fortunes were ruined nationally and within the

fascist movement, Mussolini emerged unopposed as a national figure capable of healing

the wounds of a hemorrhaging Italy. In 1920 and 1921, Mussolini and the fascists quickly

consolidated their power and began to spread across Italy. In the Po valley, Tuscany, and

Umbria, Mussolini’s socialist rivals unsuccessfully occupied a number of factories in

protest for better working conditions. Their inability to secure popular support made

socialists vulnerable to fascist takeovers in local governments. This shift was most

dramatic in Ferrara and Bologna, once-centers of northern socialism with enormous

union member counts.

However, as Bosworth writes, the workers were “poorly

instructed in union principles and practices” (150), and therefore prone to rifts, especially

in the wake of the failed factory takeovers. These internal divisions fractured the

movement and made them particularly susceptible to fascist intimidations—and to the

local propaganda machines, like the newspapers. By 1921 socialist power in the Po

collapsed in the wake of violent fascist antagonisms, and was replaced immediately by

local fascist governments and unions. With the fascist political union apparatus in place,

its most ambitious leader, Italo Balbo, began to encourage squads to march on cities north

of Ferrara, to Ravenna (where they assembled at a statue of Dante) and Venice. Balbo

would later become second to Mussolini as the Commander-in-Chief of Italian Africa

until 1940, when Italians mistook his plane for a British one and shot him down over

Tobruk, Libya.

These marches successfully turned back any socialist or leftist dissent.

“In August 1920, [the union] Federterra claimed 74,000 members in Ferrara province

alone, the highest tally in Italy (Bologna came next with 73,000)” (Bosworth 150).

In an obituary in their 22 July 1940 issue, Life magazine un-ironically referred to Balbo

as “the best type of Italian adventurer.”

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 38

Internal divisions in Giovanni Giolitti’s coalition government led to its collapse in

June 1921. By July, Mussolini renounced fascist violence, writing in a party paper that

recent converts had misinterpreted the political program as “based on violence in order to

be violent” (Bosworth 158). In his article, Mussolini also made explicit his opposition to

anti-Semitism, a pronounced point of disagreement between the Italian fascists and the

German National Socialists that would later take on greater weight and urgency when the

Nazis started to push for the Italian fascists to deport its Jews.

Mussolini made

agreements with the weakened (but, by the inertia of the state, technically still in power)

socialists, adopting a conciliatory and moderate tone in his writings. However, Mussolini

remilitarized his position in December, calling for a “military-style review” (Bosworth

162) of the roving gangs in order to strengthen their effectiveness. Mussolini had become

increasingly dissatisfied with the “agrarian slavery” fascism had come to mean (Paxton

62), and pushed for expansion into urban areas—with Rome as the ultimate end-point.

Within the party, there was still some reluctance to full embrace urbanity, which meant

an assimilation of the high cultural apparatuses of the cities that Mussolini found so

appealing. In fact, Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant Italian philosophers of

the twentieth century (and who was later jailed until the end of his life for his opposition

to Mussolini and the fascists), distinguished by 1921 a difference between “two

But Mussolini’s rhetoric did not represent Italian Fascist thinking on the Jews. In the

1920s, the editor of the popular Fascist journal La Vita Italiana, Giovanni Preziosi, ran an

article claiming that British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was of Jewish origin and

that both French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and American President Woodrow

Wilson were complicit in a Jewish “conspiracy” (Feinstein 202). Preziosi also translated

the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fraudulent text purporting to be a Jewish handbook

for global domination that originated in Russia in the early twentieth century—into

Italian.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 39

fascisms”—the agrarian and the urban (Lyttelton 133). Fascism, for Mussolini, had

focused too strongly on renovations of the farm labor systems, and not enough on

national politics. But in the February of the following year, the fascist program spread to

the university system, where the movement was already quite popular, with the

establishment of an administrative body in Bologna that could coordinate student groups

throughout the country (Bosworth 163). The inclusion of students and professors

deepened fascist roots in Italian culture, especially as the university system began to

articulate fascism as more than ideology, but as an emergent, Italian paradigm that could

strengthen and protect the state (Clark 295).

Still, despite how far the fascists reached into Italian culture, their political rule

remained limited to the north. Mussolini’s status as a national figure was checked by the

limitations of his political power, but by early 1922, with Giolitti’s coalition in a

shambles, these limitations seemed increasingly ready to expire, paving the way for his

rise to (and eventual transcendence of) prime minister. By the summer of 1922, following

the collapse of the Italian government and its replacement with a caretaker government,

northern Italy was almost completely fascist, with little to no opposition to violence

against leftists and non-Italians by government police forces. Southern Italy, on the other

hand, was unimpressed by fascist control or politics in the north, and felt largely

unthreatened by Mussolini. However, little opposition to the fascists was mobilized a

national scale, and the fascists continued to push for better representation in the

government and did everything in their power to disrupt leftist efforts to form a coalition

government. Their efforts were ultimately successful.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 40

On 22 October King Victor Emmanuel III phoned Mussolini to invite him to form

a coalition government, which he promptly agreed to do (Bosworth 168). That evening

Mussolini boarded an 8:30 train to Rome. He arrived fourteen hours later, and “marched”

on Rome with the 300,000 militarized fascists who had been camped one hundred miles

outside the city. As the Italian historian Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi has written on this

moment in his Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy,

Mussolini’s ascent to Prime Minister was, despite its vague democratic appearances, a

coup, realized through years of endless intimidation of democratic forces by both

physical and non-physical means. Not only did the fascist gangs harm the socialists by

targeting them and their families, they also engaged in a propaganda war that remade the

left into a “faceless” body of usurpers who should be purged from Italian politics so that

the “real” Italians (read the fascists) could emerge to lead. In his new government,

Mussolini was not only prime minister, but also the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the

Minister of the Interior. This third role fortified Mussolini’s position as de-facto military

and police commander of the state. Bosworth writes that Mussolini as Interior Minister,

controlled the most significant zones of national governance, the funds

separate from any budget, the access to telephone taps, the ability to act

covertly. Except from 1924 to 1926 and during the Salò Republic,

Mussolini retained this ministry throughout his regime. (177)

From 1922 to 1943, Mussolini’s rule went largely uninterrupted, and was secured by

endless intimidation of dissent elements, control of the Church, and a cultural and

philosophical program that placed Mussolini at the center of Italian life. The fascist

project remained the dominant, totalizing cultural, political, and historical force in Italian

life, and it extended its rule and influence in nearly all media, but perhaps most

noticeably in the arts. The rapid ascent of the fascists, and the consequential vice-grip

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 41

they were able to keep around Italy, was achieved through the control of the two central

narratives underlying Italian life in the early twentieth-century: the Risorgimento and the

Rome of the Caesars.

The Risorgimento was the first of these Italian narratives that the fascists co-opted

into their own. This movement lasted throughout most of the 19

century, and saw the

unification of Italy through a number of violent struggles, culminating in the Franco-

Prussian War, though the unification was completed during World War I with the

annexation of Trieste and Trento. The Risorgimento gave birth to four central figures that

became enormously powerful in the Italian imaginary by the late nineteenth century:

Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, Camillo Benso, and Giuseppe Mazzini. For the

fascists, Garibaldi was the essential hero of the Risorgimento, in part because he stifled

the Republicanism of Mazzini when he swore his allegiance to the king in a brief letter

that read, “I obey.” The allegiance was of interest to the fascists only because it

correlated somewhat to their allegiance to Emmanuel’s grandson, the king of Italy, and

provided a symbolic commitment that could conceal the illusion of their obedience. In

truth, the king was mostly powerless against Mussolini, and the fascist government

operated independently of him. Mussolini was by far a much more potent symbol of the

power structure, and the cult of personality that attended to him was more widespread

than support for the King. More importantly, Garibaldi’s effortless elision of his military

and political life into a single career that dominated Italy for much of the second half of

the nineteenth century appealed to Mussolini. By the 1920s, assimilation of the

“Garibaldian tradition” became a central effort of the fascist program, especially because

he remained by far the most popular of the Risorgimento heroes, and (for Fogu) was a

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 42

proto-Mussolini figure, part political leader, part mythic hero, part movie star. Adopting

a Garibaldian political mode was crucial to Mussolini’s rise, and he made every effort to

resemble him.

In October 1922, the New York Tribute (glowingly) wondered aloud in its

editorial pages whether Mussolini was the next Garibaldi or Caesar. Nearly a month later,

on 3 November 1922, the New York Herald editorialized that Mussolini was the next

Garibaldi. Other newspapers around the world echoed the sentiment (Falasca-Zamponi

51). Mussolini spent part of the decade attempting to absorb Garibaldi into his own

identity through public declarations of his admiration, self-conscious comparisons

between himself and Garibaldi, and (in a move that finalized the appropriation of

Garibaldi into the image of Mussolini) a ritual celebration surrounding the reburial of his

wife Anita Garibaldi. In the construction of the monument that would be unveiled at her

final resting place after a nineteenth-century style funeral parade, Mussolini engaged in a

thorough “aesthetic policing” that asserted his own reading of the history of Italy,

fascism’s place in it, ultimately celebrating “the symbolic representation of the coming-

into-being of the fascist movement” (Fogu 91).

Every detail, from the statue’s artist,

mode of representation (classical over modernist), who was invited to the celebration, to

the two parades (the first in Genoa, the second in Rome) reflected a conscious decision,

designed largely to assert the symbolic authority of Mussolini as a maker of culture.

Mussolini had been using these various ceremonies to construct himself as a bridge

between the contemporary moment and the past. These efforts, as Fogu points out,

Mussolini also used the statue as an occasion to articulate the image of the fascist ideal

of the woman. Anita, in the statue, is both a warrior and a mother, clinging to gun and

child. But the scope of this paper prevents me from going further into how Mussolini

reconfigured the ideal woman in the Italian imaginary.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 43

culminated in the second parade in the Anita Garibaldi reburial, in what he calls the

“Roman Apotheosis” of the Anita Garibaldi reburial. This second, more modern parade

stood in sharp contrast to the first, with its somber airs of the nineteenth century. The

Roman parade was, on the contrary, a fascist event like many before it, transforming the

crowds into a single, fascist subject. La Tribuna’s 3 June 1932 issue coverage even

metaphorized the crowds as a single river and a “continuous wave” (Fogu 92) with

Mussolini at its head. With a Gentilean historical consciousness, Mussolini’s Roman

parade,

rather than stressing the symbolic distance between present and past

earlier codified in the Genoese parade [for Anita], the Roman parade was

solely concerned with representing the abolition of this distance in the

development of fascism from ‘movement’ to ‘regime,’ and in the

development of its collective subject from ‘fascist subject’ to ‘fascist mass

subject.’ (Fogu 93)

By the time of the parade, there was never any question, in public or party mind, as to

who was managing this abolition. Mussolini was undoubtedly the symbol of power,

around which Italian culture amassed. The moment was not only a “Roman Apotheosis,”

it was the Risorgimento Apotheosis for Mussolini, ensuring that, in the minds of the

Roman people, he would be linked to the movement as not only an extension of

Garibaldi, but as its fifth hero.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 44

(Figure 6. Mussolini speaking to a crowd in Rome in the late 1930s)

With the Anita Garibaldi event and others like it (including the famous birthday

celebrations for Dante, Virgil, and Rome especially), all of which privileged Mussolini at

their center, Mussolini performed and publicized his reading of history as the dominant

cultural mode. Heather Hyde Minor has written how which Mussolini redesigned Rome

to accommodate his spectacles of fascist power, especially the Via dei Fori Imperiali

which, like the Via Nazionale, were key sites that stood at the “complex interplay of

urban planning, state ceremony, ritual and public art” (Minor 149) that constellated

around Mussolini. The statue of Anita and subsequent cross-country celebration was one

of the first, most dramatic examples of this complex interplay that Mussolini directed and

oriented ultimately toward himself, creating a dualism to every celebration: while

ostensibly each celebration was “for” a particular individual or event of Italian history,

they were always “about” Mussolini. Every celebration was predicated on, and was

directed at, the audience’s ability to read Il Duce’s visual articulation of his and his

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 45

government’s power. The reburial of Anita constituted only one (large) part of an official

culture of spectacle

that included numerous parades demonstrating the fascist emphasis

on the history of Italy as directed toward a realization of the fascist moment.

(Figure 7. This collage stresses the crowd’s role

in the “composition” of Mussolini.

Note the use of both the Western and fascist year date)

The accumulation of these various political and cultural successes eventually

transformed Mussolini into the central fact of fascist culture. By the mid-1920s and

continuing throughout his tenure as prime minister, Mussolini was the central figure of

Italian life—nearly every division of culture was attentive to him. The journalist, writer,

editor-in-chief of La Voce, and contemporary to Mussolini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, writes in

his book Fascism (first translated into English in 1926) that by the mid-20s, Mussolini

The fascists had already relied heavily on the spectacle—or performance—of their

power, beginning with the violent, public assertions of their authority and coming to its

maturity with the March on Rome. The filmmaker Federico Fellini, who came of age

during Mussolini’s rule, sometimes parodies this fascist impulse in his work, but

especially in his autobiographical film Amarcord (1973). One of the more memorable

scenes features a parade of young boys in front of a massive head of Mussolini made of

flowers.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 46

was a Will—”All his faculties are bent upon the attainment of his ends” (62)—and a

Force “[that] must be acknowledged as a simple, elementary and indisputable fact” (63).

For Prezzolini, who was living and writing in Italy at the time, Mussolini was the most

significant culture maker (“a force which, hurled into the very centre of Italy’s body, took

command of the organs and set them functioning” [64]) in living memory, and one that

could appeal to those around the world. For Prezzolini, Mussolini is the correction of the

failures of Wilson and Lenin, a figure of the Italian imagination as well as that of all

nations, a leader capable or reforming the country “even if it should involve the

renunciation of certain liberties” (65) for the greater good. In many ways Prezzolini’s

description of Mussolini suggests more an idea than a figure. But this image of an

undemocratic, but nevertheless popular leader (=emperor) is very much in keeping with

the classicist side of the fascist cultural program.

The second Italian narrative Mussolini co-opted was that of ancient Rome. While

the fascists made every effort to emphasize the continuity of their political program to a

heavily edited nineteenth-century, their nebulous connection to ancient Rome, and the

culture of romanità that emerged from it, held an equal sway in the Italian imaginary.

Quoted in Fogu, the scholar Piergiorgio Zunino writes that the Roman past provided “a

sea in which anyone could fish out anything for any occasion: a reminder, a justification,

a title of whatsoever nobility” (Fogu 24). Much of this interest in resurrecting Rome in

fascist ideology was underwritten by Benedetto Croce and Gentile. As I wrote earlier,

Gentile had an especially forceful influence on the construction of the Roman narrative.

He writes in his essay “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism” that the state is not “a material

presupposition,” but rather a living “creation of the mind” (Gentile 263) that is generated

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 47

when the individual (and especially the individual in a crowd) actively makes history a

present action. It isn’t difficult to imagine this argument, with its emphasis on the

existence of the Italian state as a function of both reading and thinking, leading toward an

attempt to revive Augustan Rome in the present, especially in the wake of the crippling

insecurities the First World War produced. For the fascists, Augustan Rome could be

revived, and this revival became central to the fascist conception of the security and

imperialist ambitions of the state. As Mussolini declared in a speech in 1922, Rome was

the ghost animating the fascist state: “Rome is our point of departure and our point of

reference: it is our symbol, or if you will, our myth” (Stone 205). And not only was Rome

their point of departure, in many ways it was their point of arrival. This narrative was

used for the most part to legitimize Mussolini’s absolute power as a continuation of an

eternal Italian history. It was also used to promote the invasion of North Africa as

historically justified.

For the fascists, Rome was the perfect site to situate their own political program

in, especially as they strove to normalize themselves in the historical imagination of Italy.

The image of Rome, with its strength, centralized leadership, and robust culture, was a

fertile symbolic code out of which the fascists, especially Mussolini, could derive images

of their own power. Italy’s Gentilean interest in reviving the ancient past produced a

widespread culture of romanità that influenced and was influenced by a general interest

in classicism across Europe. Marla Stone writes in her essay “A Flexible Rome: Fascism

and the cult of romanità,”

Romanità, the quality of Romanness, for the Fascists , meant a profound

spiritual and historical destiny to be made real through Fascism. […]

Rome gave form to ideological constructs such as economic autarchy,

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 48

Italian military prowess, imperial destiny, demographic urgency, the cult

of the leader, national culture and Fascism’s civilizing mission. (205-206.)

For Stone, Rome made the fascist program cohere, providing ample space for

interpretation of a vast array of symbols—the fasces, for one

—that could cloak their

“renovations” of Italian culture in a “revival” of one of the most powerful empire in

world history. The state funded countless projects to restore ancient monuments (most

notably the Ara Pacis, only recently completed) around Rome, numerous mural projects

that depicted classical scenes, and initiated a patronage program that favored Classicist

art—one of the key programs that attracted Pound to Mussolini. The fascists configured

their ideological position as one interested in renewing Italy through a return to an eternal

ideal of Rome, sloughing off the self-defeating, anti-Italian socialist reforms of the

nineteenth century. The fascists drew a line between the un-Italian, faceless left and the

real Italians, the inheritors of the Roman empire who’d spent centuries split from one

another and from power, a line the entire cultural milieu enforced through constant

iterations of faithfulness to Mussolini and the fascist government. The collective

experience of romanità, of a new Italian culture directed toward making the power of

antiquity present propelled the fascist program into every aspect of Italian culture.

Kenneth E. Silver writes in his essay “A More Durable Self,” “Beginning with the

fasces, the axe-head projecting from a bundle of elm or birch rods tied with a red leather

strap that gave the movement its name—an old Roman symbol of strength in unity and

suggestive of the penal power of the state—Mussolini’s government was extremely

conscious of building a consensus through propaganda, visual and aural (the power of

radio, as the new means to reach the masses, was recognized from early on). ‘Eagles,

Roman standards, and she-wolves,’ as curator Simonetta Fraquelli writes, ‘gradually

infiltrated many aspects of everyday life in Italy from advertising to textbooks, even to

SPQR inscriptions on drain covers’” (30).

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 49

Within this “cult,” as Stone refers to it, a stronger personality cult developed

around Mussolini, one which added yet another layer to the symbolic character of Il

Duce—that of Caesar Augustus. Stone writes that, by the mid-1930s, the fascist party

installed cultural structures that could diffuse the cult of Mussolini and construe it as the

reign of Augustus. This diffusion was achieved through a re-orientation in the arts toward

classicism, which I will touch on momentarily, and public spectacles on par with that of

the reburial of Anita Garibaldi. The fascists celebrated many national heroes and histories

in order to claim them for themselves, to determine what of Virgil or Dante would be

celebrated, and how. In 1937, Mussolini absorbed the image of Augustus within his own

with the celebration of his 2000

birthday. Stone writes,

The most extensive mobilization of Romanness in Fascist official culture

was the 1937 celebration of the bi-millenium of the birth of the emperor

Augustus, the Mostra augustea della Romania (Augustan exhibition). This

exhibition observed the 2000

anniversary of the birth of Augustus as the

occasion for a vast archaeologically focused exhibition celebrating the

Roman empire at its apex. With the Mostra augustea della Romania,

Fascism represented itself as the inexorable culmination of Italian history.

The Augustan exhibition, held in the heart of Rome, was a vast

extravaganza which revivified the ‘historic’ Rome of Augustus through an

empiricist discourse of Roman superiority. (215)

The inauguration of this exhibit, and of the Fascist Revolution Museum only an hour

later, by Mussolini himself reinforced Fascism’s “imperial/militarist and now backward-

looking self-image” (Stone 216). This self-image, reformulated after the 1920s to

construe Mussolini as Augustus, was quite successful, and achieved in part by a general

move toward the aestheticization (read Romanization) of politics. For Walter Benjamin,

these aesthetic cults of Il Duce and Rome emerged to instill in the proletariat a post-

individualist “mass sense” that thrived on continuous collective experience of the state,

experience achieved not only by grand political spectacles, like the March on Rome or

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 50

the Augustan exhibition, but also by war, thereby ensuring a kind of extreme faith in the

actions of the state that would ultimately gear it toward war. These spectacles, written by

Mussolini into the Italian imagination, formed what (as I quoted earlier) Marla Stone

refers to as a kitsch, “hyperbolic iconography” (209) that graphed the ancient past over

the modern, programming the culture with a need for violence similar to that of Rome.

In fact, Benjamin writes that fascism itself is an anesthetization of politics predicated on a

desire for violence,

the “consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’” in which politics function

as a self-generating system of representation that can only satisfy itself with itself. He

writes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “[Mankind’s] self-

alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an

aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 242). He writes that the motto of Fascism

should be “Fiat ars pereat mundus”: Let art be made even if the world should perish.

Fascist Italy was not merely a re-imagined politics of the state, it was a political aesthetic

of empire configured as a new totalizing culture, one that could be exported around the

globe—beginning with northern Africa. This aestheticization was often in a

Modernist/Classicist mode. For example, when the fascist government commemorated

the Italian victory over Ethiopia, the state commissioned a statue of Athena by the

For Mussolini, the masses themselves represented an aesthetic object that required both

interpretation and sculpting by a creative genius. In an interview, Mussolini described his

role as leader: “What would the masses do if they did not have their own interpreter who

was expressed by the spirit of the populace, and what would the poet do if he did not

have the material to forge?” (Falasca-Zamponi 23).

Russell A. Berman writes Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the

Legacy of the Avant-garde that this was directly opposed to a progressive “politicization

of the arts” he proposes that, unlike fascism, “would convene a collective recipient (‘the

masses’) endowed with an active and critical character” (Berman 39, emphasis mine).

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 51

sculptor Arturo Martini. The state, in a sense, expressed itself through art and spectacle,

both of which were configured to give that expression classical form.

The aesthetic, fascist state, with its emphasis on the politician as artist,

hypertextualized Mussolini, especially as the cult of Il Duce grew in the late 1920s and

evolved into a cult of Mussolini as Garibaldi and Augustus. In fact, Mussolini

consciously shaped this process as much as he passively accepted it, articulating himself

as both artist and masterpiece, author and text—much in the same way Augustus figured

himself as both ruler and maker. This is a threat Pound takes up in Guide to Kulchur—

something I will return to in the next chapter. Like Mussolini, Augustus put himself at the

center of the arts (through patronage) and at the architectural and cultural renovation of

Rome. While these numerous faces of Mussolini (Modernist, agrarian activist,

Risorgimento hero, artist, Il Duce, Roman emperor) were often contradictory, their

variety of audiences helped to ensure that Mussolini’s appeal was maximized across the

country. When the journalist Emil Ludwig asked Mussolini how he reconciled the

theatricality of his life with his interest in the health of the public, he responded, “The

interest of the populace is a dramatic thing. Since I serve it, I multiply myself.” Once

again, the stress is on the multiplicity of Mussolinis available to the populace. Statecraft

was as much a public service as it was a private one for Mussolini. Mussolini considered

himself “the creative soul of the nation,” and explained himself as an artist exclusively

interested in the production of beauty—”the artificer of a ‘beautiful’ system and a

‘beautiful’ doctrine,” as he describes himself in that same interview (Falasca-Zamponi

16). These multiple artificers created a vortex at the center of Italian culture—to borrow

an image from Pound—that directed all the focus of the arts inward, toward him. To

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 52

paraphrase Lyttleton, Mussolini was everything for everyone at once. Falasca-Zamponi

writes that Mussolini’s engagement with the arts created a “reciprocity between reality

and representation, [in which] the myth of Mussolini continued to expand, developing

independently of the regime” (56). This proliferation of Mussolini(s) was achieved

largely through a robust arts culture in both the public and private spheres—a culture

that, like the fascists, was explicitly interested in reviving antiquity.

The 2010 Guggenheim exhibit “Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and

Germany, 1918-1936,” which was the original inspiration for this essay, exhaustively

showcased the extent to which fascism was figured as a continuation of the political and

cultural regimes of the ancient past. After the First World War, across Europe, in public,

in mainstream and avant-garde art, classicism was revived as the dominant mode of

expression—gradually moving away from frenetic representation, like Cubism, toward a

solider one.

In his introductory essay to the Guggenheim catalog,

art critic Kenneth

Silver argues that classical form represented an alternative to the terrifying, chaotic,

Picasso, for example, turned toward French classicism in the 20’s with paintings like

Large Bather (1921) and The Source (1921). Like the other arts, architecture moved in a

similar direction. Le Corbusier explicitly reacted against Cubism in favor of Classicism in

his manifesto “Après le cubisme.” He argues for the arts to provide an antidote to the

mess of the war. “Here [in post-Cubist art], only order and purity illuminate and orient

life; […] To the same extent that [yesterday] was troubled, uncertain of its path, that

which is beginning is lucid and clear” (Silver 20). Stanislaus van Moos writes in his Le

Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis that Le Corbusier, like other intellectuals of the time,

argued that Cubism was an “elitist escape” and an “esoteric game with ornamental

forms” (Van Moos 48). Classicism, on the other hand, was a purer form, linked to an

eternal past of cleanliness and coherence.

Studies in this art are relatively new, and the Guggenheim exhibit organized by Silver

represents the most public display of this kind of work. Before him, the most famous

essay on the subject is Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of

Regression: Notes on the Return to Representation in European Painting” in October

magazine. But unlike Silver, Buchloh treats all returns to “order” as the same across

Europe, thereby erasing the meaningful differences between the many fascisms and

classicisms that Silver emphasizes.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 53

fragmented world of the war, and much of its appeal (like the appeal of fascism) came

from its explicit desire to return to order after the troubling realities of war in the

industrialized world. He writes,

the postwar culture of self-conscious forgetting rather than recollection, in

which sublimation rather than frank confrontation with unpleasant facts

determined the most significant new art forms. All the postwar talk about

life being too frenetic—and the need to rein it in—was really not about

life, but about how not to look death in the face. (19)

The art of this period sought to oppose, and correct, the “eternally fragmented and ragged

lives” of European with an “image of something totally finished and complete,” as the

German critic Franz Roh wrote. “Someday man too will be able to recreate himself in the

perfection of his idea” (Silver 27).

The reintroduction of formal cleanliness—of a

Classical formalism, howbeit restored from its fragments in museums to completion—

was one method for reorganizing and reconstituting a Europe devastated by war. The

subjectivist realities of the art movements of the latter half of the nineteenth century,

especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism, could no longer be counted on as

images for the European environment. Sculpture, for example, with its solidness became

an important “touchstone” for the other arts, especially painting, “as both the symbol of

an ancient heritage and the correction for unreliable, contingent, perishable life” (Silver

17). Sculpture was one of the primary modes of expression (along with painting and

This now seems like a curious position. After all, it was the idea of man, the perfection

of his creative faculties, of the technologies of communication, warfare, and travel, that

had so fundamentally “let down’” dream of a war-free Europe in the first place. And

following the First World War, these technologies continued to accelerate, expand, and

prolong war rather than facilitate the technocratic-utopian visions of early twentieth

century inventors and politicians (who, it should be remembered, outlawed war with the

Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1929).

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 54

mural

) for Mussolini’s government, and for the cult of Il Duce—and was a central

influence on major modernist painters, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse.

Classicism became a perfect outlet for the fascist state, as it provided an enormous

field of discourse in which the artist, the traditionalist, the peasant, and the historian

could mine for inspiration. The fragmentary, loose narrative of Rome and its artifacts,

like the de-contextualized African masks the Cubists seized in the earlier part of the

century, provided the fascists a historically-grounded, but open space in which they could

center their own ideological program. Marla Stone quotes C.E. Oppo, the Secretary

General of the Roman Quadriennale and “advocate of the modern,” who called for a

modern classicism to be integrated into the fascist state: “Fascism … must have the

courage to bear the weighty crown … of our great artistic heritage with the ease of an old

gentleman wearing a monocle … In Italy there can be no neo-classicism simply because

classicism has never grown old. In Italy one is either a classicist or nothing” (210).

Classicist or nothing, much in the same way that one was either fascist or nothing. As

Stone argues, classicism was an ideological construct that didn’t seek to revitalize the

contemporary with classical knowledge, rather it was a teleological effort to remake the

ancient past into the fascist past. Points of similarity (like the cult of the leader) enabled

for cultural intersections to develop, and allow for the contemporary and the past to meet

as the fascist present.

Countless other fascists publically supported the classicist state and its arts,

discrediting, ultimately, competitive movements within the avant-garde, like Futurism.

Muralists received an extra boost from the state with the passage of the Two-Percent

Law, which ordered 2% of all spending on public works to be used for decoration. Much

of this spending was used for classicist murals of everyday citizens. (Stone 211-12).

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 55

The Futurists mostly opposed the fascists’ classicism. For Emilio Settimelli, the

“antisocialist, anticlerical, anti-traditional” regime of “genius, art, force, unequalism,

beauty, mind, elegance, originality, color, fantasy” could not be reconciled with

classicism. The Italian empire must be Italian, he writes, “for a Roman empire would be

an act of restoration or plagiarism” (Settimelli 274). However, the extremely influential

art critic and mistress of Mussolini, Margherita Sarfatti, was a leading advocate of the

classicist revival, and used her position to discredit Marinetti and the other Futurists.

Silver writes,

Her taste for an art at once old and new, virile yet sensitive, modern but

tempered by the ‘constructive’ principles of the past, deeply Italian but not

parochial—in short, a new classicism—put her at odds with her only real

competition for cultural dominance in the Fascist Party, Filippo Tommaso

Marinetti, a friend and early supporter of Mussolini. In the years just

before World War I, Marinetti’s Futurism […] finally put Italy on the

international contemporary-art map—no mean feat—but his extremism

was now outmoded. Although his bellicose, nationalist avant-garde

movement had much that was congenial to the Fascists, his stance against

what he considered Italy’s cult of the past—’the annoying memory of

Roman greatness,’ as he wrote—condemned Futurism to history. (31)

Sarafatti’s aesthetic vision appealed to the state, and therefore won out. Those artists,

many of whom are now forgotten, were also most willing to make use of the preferred

political position of the artist: subservient to the state, responsible for representing the

idealized Italian citizen. Other critics joined her in condemning Futurism, including

Prezzolini, who argued (in response to G.K. Chesterton’s conflation of both Futurism and

fascism) that fascism, unlike Futurism, tried “to restore all our moral values” (FA 276).

Marinetti’s influence was quickly dispatched, and opposition to classicism as the

dominant mode became negligible.

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 56

Mussolini’s patronage programs and general interest in the arts made him a

centerpiece of classicist arts. Many artists who worked at the time, particularly sculptors,

saw in Mussolini’s features (both physically and philosophically) numerous strains of

Italian culture, from Futurist to Modernist to Classical. In many cases, the emphasis was

on all three at once. Adolfo Wildt’s Portrait of Benito Mussolini (ca. 1925) is one

example of the use of Mussolini to stress his classical, Augustan personality. The bust,

while consciously recalling those of the Roman emperors, mixes a Modernist realism

(dynamic, expressive features) with a Classical idealism: the bust is not so much of

Mussolini as it is of power, much in the way busts and statues of Roman emperors most

frequently represented them when they were young and virile, and therefore at the heights

of their physical, if not political, power. The exclusion of the eyes also recalls most

ancient bronze busts, the eyes of which have been lost.

(Figure 8)

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 57

This bust stresses the different choices artists faced when representing Mussolini, and the

degree to which they could pick and choose influences in order to emphasize different

characteristics of his public personality. Wildt’s Portrait is large, bronze, and recalls the

imperial power of Mussolini. It does not stress the futurist Il Duce, the figure accelerating

into the mechanized future that Marinetti found so compelling, nor does it stress the more

painterly Risorgimento history. The bust is a chilly fragment of an ancient past recently

reinvented, or better: rewritten. Wildt’s bust of Mussolini recalls a visual tradition and its

politics that both existed and didn’t. This particular bust is representative of much of

fascism’s project: the drive to bring into being a past that can simultaneously exist as

independent of and dependent on the present moment. Wildt, who has been mostly

forgotten, articulates the fascist desire to make Mussolini both the symbol of his own

power and the symbol of ancient power, of fascism and of Augustus.

The representational possibilities of Mussolini were endless. The countless

traditions, discourses, and symbols that linked to him, and thereby constituted him,

provided hundreds of images to draw upon in the construction of an original image of

power. Mussolini could exist in abstract, Modernist form, as in the case of Thayaht’s Il

Duce with Milestone (1929, left), or in Futurist eternal motion, like in Renato Bertelli’s

Continuous Profile of Mussolini (1933, right):

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 58

(Figure 9) (Figure 10)

At the Guggenheim’s exhibit all three of these busts were lined up together, commenting,

I think, on the nexus of representational opportunities that were made available to artists

under the fascist regime. While Marinetti’s futurism lost its state-endorsement, its

representational mode proved helpful to the regime, especially as it geared the public for

another world war. Like the Risorgimento and Rome, it too was absorbed into the cult of

Mussolini, and became a generative site for representation in service of the state.

Like the various artists that represented Mussolini, the Italian spectator could pick

and choose from the various representational modes that Mussolini made available to him

or her through his appropriation of the various conversations that figured him. Each

aspect of Mussolini’s career in power was linked back to a discourse, and every reader of

Mussolini’s events and life were invited to refer back to that discourse in order to “read

into” him whatever satisfied their criteria for a capable leader. As I argued before,

Mussolini functioned more like a hypertextual site than a traditional leader, as a coherent

II. Mussolini Rising: Reading Il Duce as Hypertext Durbin 59

text that constantly redirects the inquiring reader to source material in order to disclose its

intellectual origins. As a political tactic, this didn’t make Mussolini more transparent,

rather it enabled him to distract his readers with the various histories and personalities he

claimed were his own. The obvious, present form was never very clear, but always stood

out in the crowd as a refractory hall of mirrors, never exactly reflecting the view, but

rather what the viewer expected to see.

For Pound, whose own poetry frequently adopted or impersonated historical

modes of composition (in translation and imitation of the works of Chinese poets,

troubadours, Old English writers, and the Classical authors), Mussolini must have

appealed because he was such a nexus of disparate meanings and traditions brought

together by one man. Like much of Pound’s own work, and especially the Cantos, which

has been frequently referred to as hypertextual (and has even been partially made into one

on the Internet), Mussolini contained history, and in containing it cherry-picked,

imagined, and revised the threads of historical inquiries and narratives he sought and

bound together into an authoritative image of history—much in the way the fasces, once

it binds together the sticks that beforehand had no symbolic power, becomes the

authoritative image of power. As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, the Cantos are a kind of

literary analog to Mussolini: both are formally interested in impersonation, reanimation,

and revision of historical particulars into a new narrative that propose themselves as the

tool to decipher the secret meaning of the narratives they construct.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 60

III

Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound

For is what I have made be only salvage?

—Clark Coolidge

The difficulty of Pound begins with how he reads. The following chapter will not

be able to fully engage his reading practice, entirely understand it, or disentangle it; the

wily spirit of Pound designed its receptacles, particularly Guide to Kulchur and Cantos,

so that any attempt to full unravel the knot will only frustrate your efforts. This isn’t to

say that Pound’s intelligence is such that he escapes comprehension, but that

comprehension wasn’t always the motivating force behind him—rather, it is an

underlying sense of contradiction and accidence, of imitation and renewal that propels

much of Pound’s work. Pound’s poetry and (less often) his prose stand in direct

opposition to any attempt to parse it out fully: the range of details that have accumulated

into his work come from everywhere, often lack citation, and any attempt to account for

them all would be futile (even if most can be)—and this, for Robert Duncan in The H.D.

Book at least, was the motivating power behind his “impersonating genius.” Pound comes

from everywhere, from research and exploration as well as error, and he doesn’t always

want you to know where everywhere is. Hugh Kenner points out in his essay “Notes on

Amateur Emendations” that some of those most mysterious and enigmatic moments in

Pound come straight from printing mistakes. For example, Canto 13 ends with a repeated

line, and an erroneous quotation mark. Why? Kenner, when he proposed to anthologize

the poem to Pound, asked him. He received the following reply: “Repeat in 13 sanctioned

by time and the author, or rather first by the author, who never objects to the typesetter

making improvements” (Kenner 26). My first impulse here is to write an exclamation

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 61

point and leave it at that. Rather than correct the typesetter’s superfluous addition to the

text, Pound leaves it, and allows his poem to absorb a new emphasis that wasn’t present

before. As Kenner points out, there are hundreds more known errors such as this one, but

it’s anyone’s guess as to number of the unknown. Many of the known errors originate in

typesetting errors in the Greek and Chinese. Others, including the unknown, come from

Pound’s sources—including his concise Liddell and Scott Greek lexicon. While Pound’s

Greek is famously wonky, a misprint in the lexicon led him to an erroneous title in

Lustra. But in Pound, error can turn into knowledge as much as any fact can: history is

full of errors, and yet we continue to read and write it. While history is a source of

enormous anxiety for Pound, especially because it can be so easily manipulated to

exclude or conceal the truth, it is also a site of enormous potential for new paths out of

the contemporary moment. Even if most of normative history might be a conspiracy

against the truth, that never means that history itself can’t be used for the better. One of

Europe’s many problems was usury, but it didn’t matter that Pound couldn’t always

locate all the facts or that there were holes in his theory because he felt, based on his

analyses of some histories and sources, that it was true, that history had been intentionally

obscured by agents of usury. In this regard, the absence of a fact becomes the evidence of

its existence. The flaw in this history-writing model is obvious, and Pound’s teleological

search for a league of corrupting Jews in the banks, and therefore in the Western machine

(“JEW/nation,” he describes the United States in one of his radio speeches), lead him to

disastrous conclusions about who causes war.

But this chapter will not focus too much on Pound’s anti-Semitism. I don’t want

to suggest that it isn’t an important issue, or one that isn’t crucial to a full understanding

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 62

of Pound’s economics and poetics, but Pound’s anti-Semitism poses a number of

problems, many of which do not relate directly to his fascism. Pound wasn’t led to

fascism because of its apparent anti-Semitism, but because it proposed, in part, a

correction to capitalism—one centered around an eternal, truer Roman history, and a

fairer economic model. The image of the Jew in Pound reflects less his fascism than it

does his poor economics, which Pound developed out of his flawed research into history

and his confused reading of the enablers of the present capitalism system. As Jean-Paul

Sarte writes (quoted in Paul Morrison’s Poetics of Fascism),

The anti-Semite has a fundamental incomprehension of the various forms

of modern property: money, securities, etc. They are abstractions […] The

anti-Semite can conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land

based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and its

possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation; he is the poet of

real property . . . (Morrison 52)

Anyone who has read through Pound’s fascist writings, including those in Machine Art

and the radio speeches, has immediately registered Pound’s teleological, prejudiced

approach to history. It’s not only bad, it’s mostly non-sense. For Pound the Jew is a

Maxwell’s demon, the invisible mediator that makes the system he opposes function.

Naturally there is no such thing, or at least no such conspiratorial, racial thing, but in an

effort to locate it Pound generated an enormous mythology to back up his accusations.

The Jews control the banks, the newspapers, the governments, exchange rates, art,

Paul Morrison writes in introduction to Poetics of Fascism, “Modernism (for the Other

People)”: “The Jew remains in the discourse of poststructuralism no less than in Pound,

the privileged figure for figuration, the paradoxical (non)referent for a semiotic order, at

once linguistic and economic, which eludes referentiality. And while this is

(emphatically) not to impute anti-Semitic motives, conscious or otherwise, to

poststructuralism, it is to insist that the poststructuralist identification of the Jew with the

nonteleological, nonreferential play of language unwittingly serves to naturalize the

traditional (and traditionally disastrous) association of the Jew with the closed semiotics,

the infinitely deferred finalities, of capitalist economies” (Morrison 10).

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 63

religion, everything. The Jew in Pound, the ghost in the war machine, is not only a sign

of usury, but, as Bob Perelman points out in his book Trouble with Genius, is a sign of

the moral decay of Western civilization (Perelman 66), a kind of symbolic catch-all.

I can’t account for everything in Pound—his reading list far exceeds the scope of

this paper. He is both elusive and allusive, sometimes choosing to reveal the rules of the

complex language/compositional game of his poetics, sometimes not. I don’t want to

over-rely on the metaphor, but the image of the game is helpful for understanding

Pound’s elliptical work: the extent to which the play of references, of histories and

fictions, seems designed in part to activate a game-sense in the reader, one that requires

thinking through as much as it does thinking about the language. The system of

particulars that generate meaning in the Cantos is not arranged in such a way that the

reader will immediately, or even with much time, understand what’s “going on” in the

narrative or syntactical sense of the work. In this paper I will not only draw some

conclusions on the ethics that underscore this compositional practice, but also trace some

of the origins of this practice outside it that have not been explored in much depth by

For Pound not every Jew is usurious, the Jewish race is predisposed to greedy

utilitarianism and self-interestedness. In a 1955 letter to Louis Zukofsky (a Jewish poet

and friend of Pound’s), Pound writes, “The statement that NO jew will ever do anything

useful, cannot be sustained / [economist Alexander] Del Mar did a whale of a LOT that

was and is useful. It might be asked: under what circs/ will a jew do anything useful to

anyone but himself, OR to anyone but himself when not considering the ultimate utility

in reflex” (P/Z 211). Even after the war, when Pound had supposedly “recanted” his anti-

Semitism and fascist support, Pound can’t help but frame the Jew in terms of a

stereotyped half-knowledge. Pound didn’t need evidence to back his claims that the Jews

ran the banks and started the wars, he felt it—even if the outcome of a conflict like World

War Two so obviously opposed any theory that the Jews wanted a war that would very

nearly eliminate them. I don’t have time for this aspect of Pound, though I recognize its

central presence in much of his writings. Thankfully, numerous critics—and friends of

Pound—have criticized him and his work, parsing as best they can the sources,

motivations, and mistakes that compose his anti-Semitism.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 64

Pound’s critics. Pound’s poem has often been compared to a hypertext, and parts of it

have even been made into one online, but the degree to which that hypertext is a mirror of

the living hypertext I proposed in the previous chapter has been underexplored. In this

chapter I will attempt to establish some link between Gentile/Mussolini and

Pound/Cantos: not a perfect mirror image of one another, but certainly an image of

occasional, shared glances, fragments that bear a family resemblance, mutual interests,

and related conclusions.

Gentile’s argument for the integration of the past into present consciousness is

echoed in the contemporaneous aesthetic program developed by T.S. Eliot (as I

referenced earlier in this essay) and Pound. Whether Gentile was on Pound’s mind when

he began to develop this program is somewhat unclear; it is very likely that he read him,

or was in some way familiar with his ideas, especially while he was living in Italy. His

interest in Italian culture, in museum culture, and in Futurism and fascism would

certainly have brought him within close proximity of Gentile’s arguments. In any case,

his argument in the “Praelatio” section of the Spirit of Romance (1910) certainly

anticipates Gentile:

It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of

Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in

Morrocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the

minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time

is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grand-

children’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have

already been gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting

receptacle. (SR VI.)

But Pound’s argument isn’t quite Gentile’s. He seems more interested in (1) the relative

development of societies (and therefore in discrediting the facile view of linear history

based on progress) and in (2) an auratic or spiritual trans-historical quality of literature.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 65

However, Pound is certainly beginning an argument that would eventually evolve into a

Gentilean poetics for agency in historiography, a revisionary poetics based on

representation of historical data and narratives within a new, present mode, like in the

elision of Sigismondo and other epic heroes with Mussolini in the early cantos, which I’ll

return to later in this chapter. Pound, surveying the industrialization of various

geographical locations around the planet, draws a conclusion on the function of history:

that the narrative of progress imposed by the West, which he seems to implicitly

condone, operates at relative speed. This observation leads him to develop a poetics that

levels literary history as a horizontal field upon which writers of any age can sync up

with one another. Rather than conceive of an unattainable past, Pound begins in the Spirit

of Romance to think about a poetics that frees him from contemporary restraints and

allows him to enter into a dialectical conversation with the writers of the previous eras.

Pound’s proto-Gentilean argument—that “All ages are contemporaneous”—is

more fully developed by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the thinking

of which Jean-Michel Rabaté argues was likely inspired by the “Praelatio” of The Spirit

of Romance (Rabaté 214). There is no concrete evidence that this is true, but in all

likelihood conversation and collaboration with Pound, in addition to reading his criticism,

led Eliot to his conclusions in “Tradition.” Modifying Rabaté, I would also argue that

“Tradition” emerges out of Eliot’s temporary conversion to Bergsonism (later revised in

his thesis on F.H. Bradley) and his philosophy of history while he studied at Harvard.

However, the critical program that jointly forms (and informs) the two writers is owed in

large part to their friendship. Eliot certainly articulates a view of history that seems to

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 66

have been on Pound’s mind in 1910, and later becomes central to his poetics in the

Cantos. Eliot suggests tradition is a history that operates as

a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the

historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own

generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature

of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own

country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

(Tradition)

For Eliot, history is a series of continuously developing patterns recorded as tradition.

Timothy Materer writes in his essay “T.S. Eliot and his critical program” that “Eliot

becomes convinced that no experience is ‘real nor any ‘fact’ valid unless it fits into a

pattern or system of relations that gives it meaning—even though this meaning can never

be final since the pattern is always changing and the system always developing.” (51) G.

Douglas Atkins, in his critical study of Eliot’s criticism, T.S. Eliot and the Essay, agrees:

In “Tradition,” “pattern or structure emerges as most important, and Eliot will spend his

career honoring that sense of the prevailing and revealing pattern.” (54) In Eliot’s view,

this pattern is crucial not only because it informs the present but because the present

informs (=alters) it, ascribing to those who participate in the weaving of tradition an

enormous agency, similar to Gentile’s reader of history as present. Both argue for an

increased agency in the reader, and the way that reader’s participation in tradition (or

historiography) can construct and reconstruct its narrative as a present.

However, there isn’t any real evidence that Eliot had much knowledge of

Gentile—he very likely had never heard of him at the time he was writing “Tradition”—

nor can the fascist tendencies in Eliot’s writings be credited to the Italians. Eliot’s

fascistic Europeanism, which he explicitly argued for in his essays in the Criterion, was

based mostly on his interest in Charles Maurras and the L’action Française of the 1920’s.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 67

And Eliot, as Peter Dale Scott writes, ultimately rejected fascism out of Christian

opposition to its materialism (65). Cleo Kearns agrees, writing that Eliot located in

Christianity the only ethics that could oppose the “untrammeled operations of modern

finance and the assumption in both domestic and foreign affairs of […] real-politik”

(Kearns 91). Although both Eliot and Pound disagreed on a fundamental political level,

both developed, and sought, an ethics and poetics that could propose an alternative to

capitalism. In any case, Eliot’s flirtation with Charles Maurras was not really one with

fascism, and any resemblance his ideas might bear to Gentile’s can probably be traced to

a similar, but common reading list.

Like Gentile, who expanded his program to extend

beyond historiography, Eliot later expanded the critical program of “Tradition and the

Individual Talent” by broadening his definition of “tradition” in the 1933 lectures that

would become After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Tradition, for Eliot, is

not only the accumulation of texts and compositional practice, it is, as Materer writes, “a

variety of customs—including everything from greeting a stranger to participating in a

religious rite—which are dependent on a stable society and a unified religious

background” (57). Leaving aside Eliot’s religious beliefs (which is quite difficult, but

nevertheless necessitated by the scope of this paper),

Eliot’s theory that the present and

Eliot’s prejudices and their family resemblance to fascism (particularly his anti-

semitism) merit attention, but this isn’t the focus of this paper. Peter Dale Scott writes

that Eliot’s prejudices were not limited to him, but to “culture he adopted.” Eliot

participated “in processes of rationalization and denial”—particularly in an anonymously

written article in the Criterion that dismisses an early expose of Nazi genocidal practices

as “sensationalist”—“for which we may better seek psychological than logical

explanations” (66). I’m not so certain of this, but again the scope of this paper limits my

ability to investigate further.

Eliot eventually developed a Christian metaphysics that made Christianity the site of

transcendence of history. Pound, whose religious feelings are knotted, opaque, and

changing are decidedly unlike Eliot’s. For one, Pound found the Christian use of the Old

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 68

past can alter one another through individual present action certainly must have appealed

to Pound, if only because it so clearly reflected his own thinking.

Pound’s thinking on history before the war culminated in Guide to Kulchur, his

1938 “guidebook” for Paideuma, or “the new thinking.” This new thinking is, for Pound,

Confucian at its basis: “a type of perception,

a kind of transmission of knowledge

obtainable only from such concrete manifestation” (GK 28)—an Anschauung of history

that privileges intuition over than book knowledge. In Pound’s reading of the Analects

and the Odes, Confucian knowledge, which is a knowledge more directly related to the

world than most of Western thinking, has “no syllogistic connection” between historical

data points because those connections are beside the point, and if any exist, are likely

borne out of misperception. But Pound’s argument on intuitive knowledge in Guide to

Kulchur is problematic precisely because it presupposes a previous knowledge of history

and texts, but nevertheless argues that any intellectual work, including the trans-historical

connections between writers and ideas, is intuitive—the foundation of Pound’s privileged

understanding, the immediate grasping of the fact of things and their meanings. While

knowledge “may be necessary to understanding,” “it weighs as nothing against [it] …

once you understand process” (GK 50). Pound’s prose is often clipped, and rarely goes

into greater depth in arguing his more complicated ideas and proposals. Instead he often

the line that others have already explained what he means and the reader should refer to

Testament extremely problematic and likely the source of Europe’s “spiritual

bankruptcy” via usury (MA 133). For Pound, Christianity’s Roman elements—

Catholicism’s quasi-polytheism in the Holy Trinity (MA 143)—was the only appealing

aspect of Christianity. The absolute monotheism of Protestants represented a Jewish

corruption (“that pest of the Occident” [MA 133]) of Roman Europe. Christ, in Poundian

philosophy, is nothing more than an “irresponsible protagonist” (GK 38).

cf. Eliot’s use of “perception” in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” especially in

the sections quoted earlier.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 69

those writers and professors. For Pound, his understanding, which he holds to be superior

(consider how many “guidebooks” he wrote) to that of the general reader, a reader who

he imagines has been waylaid by a general cultural malaise and backwardness, is always

just out of reach. The reader of Pound’s work is often asked to be “patient”—but rarely

does Pound’s criticism ever culminate in a justification of the reader’s patience through

full explication. In the opening of Guide to Kulchur he assures the reader that he has a list

of “perfectly good ideas … thirty feet from where I am sitting,” but he never makes very

clear what those ideas are, only giving the reader brief, vague glimpses into his own

insight on various world cultures, languages, and thinking.

Eliot’s argument about tradition, and Pound’s own argument in the “Praelatio,” is

recapitulated in Guide to Kulchur, but with an even stronger literary sense:

It is quite foolish to suppose that Heraclitus, after the quite H. Jamesian

precisions of the Odyssey, and before the Shakespearian humour of Plato’s

character drawing, merely said “Everything flows,” or that any one

abstract statement wd. have made him his reputation. (GK 31)

Here, and elsewhere, Pound operates with the assumption that’s history’s flow is non-

linear, and that a central mistake of historical thinking is to think of its flow as

chronologically episodic rather than happening relative to a culture. “We do NOT know

the past in chronological sequence,” Pound writes, implicitly arguing for the his approach

to history in the Cantos, rather “what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying

from us and from our own time” (GK 60). Like Eliot, Pound’s position on history is that

it can be influenced as much as it can influence. And for Pound, like Gentile, history is

not a set of ideas, but a set of “ideas going into action” (GK 44)—a decidedly Roman,

rather than Greek, glory for both thinkers. Echoing Gentile and the fascists, Pound’s

explicitly favors Rome over other Western historical moments, arguing that the Romans

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 70

tried, like Confucius, “to work out an orderly system, a modus vivendi for vast multitudes

of mankind” (GK 40). The Greeks, on the other hand, resorted to escape mechanisms

(e.g. Homer) that ultimately crippled the civilization and lead to their defeat and

enslavement. Unfortunately, the progress made by Justinian and Constantine was

interrupted by the twin influences of Jewish and Christian monotheism, which in turn

produced “an age of usury” that devolved Western governments into financially-

motivated, corrupt corporate nations. Pound was opposed to the usurious practices of

banks and their colluding Western governments, and isolated the collapse of Rome as one

of the beginnings of the watering down of the West through financial malpractice. But for

Pound there is an antidote to usury, the practice that muddles definition (and also dissent

against the system): Totalitarianism: “the sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre” (GK 95). This

fact has been distressing for many critics throughout the long reception history of

Pound’s works, and a number of critical strategies have emerged in response to the

obvious “problem” of Pound’s politics. Before I can directly treat the Cantos and their

relationship to Mussolini, I think it’s important to first understand how Pound (as poet

and/or fascist) and the Cantos have been thought about in selected criticism since Hugh

Kenner.

Over a spaghetti dinner in Rapallo in 1928, W.B. Yeats, Pound’s friend and

mentor, asked Richard Aldington: “How do you account for Ezra? Here is a man who

produces the most distinguished work and yet in himself is the most undistinguished of

men” (Carr). Aldington had no response, but perhaps because there is no answer to

Yeats’ somewhat fallacious, but common observation, one that reflects an impulse in

many of Pound’s readers to “divide” him and his works. How can it be done? For critics

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 71

and lovers of Pound’s work, Pound’s fascism has been an enormous headache, and one

that is often enough avoided or dealt with strangely. Bob Perelman rightly argues in his

essay “Pound and the Language of Genius” that Pound must be viewed as a whole, even

if it’s an incoherent and troubling whole. While his works can obviously be graded on a

sliding scale of vitriol, the underlying, evolving poetics cannot, and regardless of the

political content within each work, they are of the same whole. Most often critics have

avoided the fascist question by mentioning it as a biographical detail that temporarily

seized his poetics, only to later be recanted. This strategy has most often taken the form

of a separation between Pound the man and Pound the poet, a schematic approach that

has the two only occasionally overlapping. It was probably first articulated by one of

Pound’s greatest champions, Hugh Kenner, who spent his life promoting and apologizing

for Pound, especially in his seminal (and valuable) book The Pound Era.

Kenner’s work is doubtlessly an essential tool for understanding Pound’s poetry,

criticism, and life. His friendship and correspondence allowed him insight that is crucial

to understanding Pound’s compositional practices, and the ways accidence featured into

Pound’s poetics. However, his criticism’s excuse of Pound’s fascism gave license to

numerous critics and poets that followed him to avoid or cordon off Pound’s toxic

politics as secondary to his poetics. In Kenner, Pound’s anti-Semitism is a semantic

mistake, rather than a racial one (Perelman 42). And like Kenner, Carroll Terrell, who

wrote A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, goes to extraordinary lengths to parse

Pound’s anti-Semitism as a mask for his economic criticism. In Poundian terms, the Jew

is code for usurer, and Pound’s use (and therefore his anti-Semitism) should not be

confused as real anti-Semitism, but rather as anti-usury marked by an empty racism.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 72

Because of it’s importance to understanding how people think about Pound’s anti-

Semitism, a deep prejudice significant to his fascism, I will quote in full Terrell’s

definition of Pound’s meaning of “kikery.” It is representative of the lengths critics have

gone to redefine Pound’s fascism, and its attendant racism, as problematic but

misunderstood. Note that Terrell (and Kenner, who he quotes from) never identifies the

term as a racial epithet, except perhaps in the use of the word “opprobrious.” In fact,

Terrell quickly moves away from the meaning of the actual word:

55. kikery: An opprobrious epithet Pound applies to usurers and

financiers—who foster wars and depressions to make money—as well as

to intellectuals in universities and the publishing world who appear to

support them. Once, when asked how he could say he was not anti-Semitic

when he used words such as “kike” and “kikery,” he replied with some

feeling: “There are Jew kikes and non-Jew kikes.” Pound marks the

passage in italics to be set in a somewhat smaller type: “carattere un poco

piu piccolo” [MB, Trace, 296]. The passage is intended to rhyme with the

4 lines in The Divine Comedy where, at the summit of Paradise, St. Peter

castigates “him who usurps my seat on earth” and says, “he has made of

my burial place a cloaca of blood and filth” [Par. XXVII, 22-26]. Because

there was no clear thought about the way divinity manifested in the world,

such people as those listed allowed the inciting causes of WWI to operate

in 1913. Marx and Freud need no glosses, but less the reader jump to the

wrong conclusion, see the index to SP, where Marx is listed 18 times and

Freud 4. If one reads all Pound has said about Freud over the years, one

concludes he has less quarrel with Freud than he does with Freudians, a

rhyme with Christ and Christians or the Buddha and Buddhists [99:25].

Pound said: “People treated by Freudians, etc. get steadily more and more

interested in their own footling interiors, and … less interesting to anyone

else … They are at the nadir from Spinoza’s sane and hearty: the more

perfect a thing is the more it acts and the less it suffers [NEW May 2

1935]. N.B.: The functional words in the 8 lines are, “no clear thought

about holiness.” A parallel to the unhappy custom of using racial epithet is

found in Joyce’s Leopold Bloom who, enraged by a money-lender named

Dodd, said: “Now he’s what you call a dirty Jew.” Dodd in fact wasn’t a

Jew and Bloom was [HK].

But I might add that I think Bloom’s anti-Semitism represents a self-oppressive impulse,

not merely a loose economic condemnation, one that Joyce noted in the Irish and

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 73

analogized in his Jewish protagonist. Fictional Bloom’s response to fictional Dodd is not

the same as non-fictional Pound’s to non-fictional interlocutor. This example of Terrell’s

aversion to noting the racial dimension of Pound’s politics ignores a significant amount

his writing, including the radio speeches, where Pound makes it explicit that the Jews are

inherently usurious, and are responsible for European wars.

The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, arguably the most widely available

source of contemporary Pound criticism, takes a similar approach. Pound’s critics in the

essays stick his fascism in the biographical cage, avoiding its influence on his poetics.

For example, Daniel Albright’s essay “Early Cantos I-XLI” and Ian F. A. Bell’s “Middle

Cantos XLII-LXXI”—which cover the Malatesta cantos and those written while Pound

was living in Mussolini’s Italy—make no mention of fascism or Mussolini, even when

the connection is obvious, as in the case of Pound’s hero Sigismundo, a figure I’ll return

to shortly. Ronald Bush’s essay on the late cantos, the cantos in which fascism is

explicitly dealt with, mostly avoids the question, too. Bush limits his analysis of the

political context of the Pisan Cantos to Pound’s “farewell” to Mussolini in the final canto

in an analytical approach that fails to account for the other passages in the cantos in

which Pound writes about Mussolini. Bush assumes a linearity to the work that simply

doesn’t exist, and bases his central claim on a dubious reading of the Greek “Xaire” at the

end of the poem—a claim I will return to at the end of this chapter. Tim Redman’s essay

“Pound’s politics and economics” amazingly does no better a job at interpreting the

politics of Pound’s poetics, though he was likely selected because much of his writing on

Pound has dealt with Pound’s politics.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 74

Redman’s book Ezra Pound and Fascism, one of the most recent direct treatments

of Pound’s fascism in book form, fails along similar lines as his essay for the Cambridge

Companion does. Redman struggles to negotiate his criticism of Pound with his

appreciate of the poetry. But rather than try to understand Pound’s politics, the economic,

intellectual, and social crucible in which they formed, Redman attempts to excuse them

as weak and only half-hearted. This simply isn’t true or fair to Pound. Redman’s struggle

to discredit Pound’s political positions seems to emerge out of a misunderstanding of

Pound’s fascism in the first place, and likely relies on popular images (and distaste) for

fascism that elides Italian fascism with National Socialism.

Redman downplays

Pound’s anti-Semitism as “unconvincing,” but his argument is nonsensical, as is most of

his virtually useless book on Pound. He argues that Pound’s anti-Semitism was mild, and

reflected, as Terrell wrote before him, an uncomfortable vocabulary rather than actual

racial prejudice. And yet Pound’s fascist period produced the radio speeches, the essays

collected as Machine Art, and little known essays like “Jews and the War,” “The Jew:

Pathology Incarnate”, and “Anglo-Israel” (three essays that Redman himself mentions,

but avoids any discussion of)—documents that are hardly “unconvincing” testaments to

Pound’s anti-Semitism and pro-fascism (Redman 256). Any ethical reader of Pound’s

letters at this time, especially those written to the composer Gerhart Munch, would be

hard-pressed to characterize his endless rants against the “kikes” and their “kikery” as

mild. But Redman is so averse to any criticism Pound’s anti-Semitism that he regularly

falls into contradiction, going so far as to say excuse Pound’s numerous recorded

recommendations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion because they aren’t fanatical

This is not to say that one is better or worse, but to say that they are different, and both

have a different relationship to Europe and the Jews.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 75

enough, and are therefore evidence of Pound’s suspicion of the text. For Redman, the fact

that Pound’s copy isn’t marked as much as his other books suggests that Pound wasn’t

convinced by its argument. While it is certainly true that Pound recognized the

fallaciousness of the fictional document, he nevertheless appreciated it enough to

recommend it in the first place.

Credo: Pound was a fascist, and thoroughly believed in the Mussolini’s regime.

While he was an anti-Semite, his anti-Semitism was mostly incidental to his fascism (he’s

certainly more prejudiced against the Jews than Mussolini was), and this was largely

borne out of a belief that Jews controlled the banks and the banks made war. For Pound,

Mussolini was the best hope to clean up a capitalist system he believed was designed to

bring about war in order to fatten the wallets of a select few. That he named those few the

“Jews” or “kikes” is one of the most significant moral failings of any poet of the

twentieth century, but his anti-Semitism should not be confused with his fascism, even

though it can’t be disentangled from it. I suspect that most critics’ discomfort with

Pound’s politics comes from an inability to unstick themselves from the popular image of

fascism—an image of National Socialism and “Hiterlian yawping,” as Pound wrote of it

in Jefferson And/Or Mussolini, rather than its very different relative, Italian fascism. I

don’t want to excuse Pound’s fascism or Italian fascism generally as benevolent—they

most certainly were not. However, it is worth noting, if only to go some way of

recuperating Pound from his critics, that Pound’s central issue with Western economics,

and therefore of Western government, is usury, the banking practice of levying a charge

“for the use of purchasing power […] without regard to production” (C 230), which he

credits as the single biggest opposition to progress and peace in the world. Somewhat

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 76

strangely, Pound’s racism and fascism emerge from a pacifist desire for peace. This is

most explicit in Guide to Kulchur (GK 61) as well as the Cantos, including one of the

most famous cantos, “XLV”:

With Usura

With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting

that design might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

(C.XLV.230)

The image of a “painted paradise” is complex, and doesn’t simply refer to a false or

artificial image, like one might assume, but rather (as he writes in the later Cantos) is an

image of hope, of a better future than the present that must be necessarily artificial

because it doesn’t exist yet. In the value of the “painted paradise,” Pound centers the poet

and artist, the individual capable of creating an image of a better future out of a terrible

past. Pound continues with a litany of beautiful things that usury prevents, including

churches, productivity, craftsmanship, “the child in the womb,” love, sex. Usury, for

Pound, is “CONTRA NATURAM”—”Corpses are set to banquet / at behest of usura.”

Usury doesn’t only stand in the way of peace, it stands against the right way of things—

generating enormous confusion in simple things. This confusion necessitates definition,

and definition, in Pound, necessitates fascism. Pound frequently writes about how so few

people can see through the murk of usury, which produces both bad government and

economic disenfranchisement:

and when bad government prevailed, like an arrow,

fog rose from the marshland

bringing claustrophobia of the mist

beyond the stockade there is chaos and nothingness

(C.LXXX.520)

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 77

In Poundian political philosophy, totalitarianism (=Mussolini), defines this confusion and

clears up its muck.

The question in thinking about the formal connections between Mussolini as

hypertext and Pound’s Cantos is, What about Il Duce appealed to him? As he writes in

Guide to Kulchur, perhaps the most widely read of Pound’s critical writings from the late

30’s, when he was living in fascist Italy full-time, Italian totalitarianism provides order.

Pound’s theory of government is based on his interpretation of Confucian principles,

which in themselves could be seen as proto-fascist in their focus on defining good

government as a leader’s total (but ethical) control of his nation. Pound opens his Guide

with a digest of the Confucian analects, and closes his earlier, explicitly fascist book of

criticism—Jefferson And/Or Mussolini—with a similar, but shorter digestion. The focus

in Jefferson is on the ways Jefferson and Mussolini, two leaders who Pound sees as

analogous to one another (howbeit with some crucial differences), achieve supreme

order. He ends the book: “Towards which I assert again my own firm believe that the

Duce will not stand with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of / ORDER

/ τὸ καλὸν” (J/M 128). Pound throughout the book makes a distinction between leaders

who are driven by power, and those driven by order. In the second bracket he lists Lenin,

Mussolini, and Jefferson, and sees them as leaders who act based on “facts” and who, in a

Gentilean mode,

can immediately transform those facts into action.

In his writing, Pound never references Gentile, though twice in Jefferson And/Or

Mussolini he obscurely references an Italian thinker named “G” whose arguments bear

resemblance to Gentile’s. No direct link can be established between the two, other than to

say that, as I demonstrated in the second chapter, by virtue of Gentile’s power and

ubiquity in the Mussolini regime, Pound must have encountered his ideas. But Pound’s

forgoing any acknowledgement of Gentile is keeping with his citational practices—

except for a few intellectuals, friends, and historical figures, he only occasionally cites

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 78

The FACT is the essential item in Pound’s reading of history and its impact on the

present, but most facts are obscured by preconceptions. “It takes a genius charged with

some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast [the common man] out of these

preconceptions.” And for Pound, as Perelman’s essay points out, the genius is the rare

individual who can achieve a Confucian utopia, who can instantly perceive “the

unassailable formula, the exact distribution” of the economics that will make this utopia

possible (J/M 26). Mussolini is this creative genius, capable of instant perception of facts

and subsequent action; Mussolini is not only a political leader, not only a world-maker,

but an artist: “Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything

save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (J/M 34). And Mussolini as

artifex is also a DEBUNKER, a virtual superhuman who discredits 500 lies a morning,

and who continues to drive things—res publica—into order: “The secret of the Duce is

possibly the capacity to pick out the element of immediate and major importance in any

tangle; or, in the case of a man, to go straight to the centre, for the fellow’s major

interest.” (J/M 66). In Pound’s writing, Mussolini is the same multi-purpose, multi-

valiant, demi-god seated at the intersection of multiple discourses the fascist regime

sought to construct in its propaganda, as I made clear in the previous chapter. He is an

artist, historian, leader, economist, even scientist, because scientists, like fascists, “are

interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal

considerations, personal petty vanities and so on” (J/M 68). The textual figure inter-

penetrated by, and inter-penetrating, the variegated strains of Italian and world history in

anyone by name, usually referring to them by a letter or by a vague description of them as

a famous person. It is a formal move on Pound’s part, I think, that enables him to seem

less indebted to the ideas of others’, especially those he perhaps only half-agrees with, as

I suspect is the case of Gentile.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 79

Pound is in near total agreement with fascist propaganda. When he writes in Guide to

Kulchur

Mussolini [is] a great man, demonstrably in his effects on event,

unadvertisedly so in the swiftness of mind, in the speed with which his

real emotion is shown in his face, so that only a crooked man cd.

misinterpret his meaning and his basic intention[,]

fascist propaganda and Pound’s writing are nearly identical. Like the fascists, Pound

writes that Italy was in a crisis of system, rather than of politics, and Mussolini was the

only “genius … to see and repeatedly affirm” the fact of it (GK 186). And as a genius, as

an artifex (and, I might add, as an artifice), only Mussolini could construct and be

constructed as the solution to this crisis.

The degree to which Pound’s fascism is transcribed into his poetics is clearest

when he valorizes poetry as better than prose because “there is MORE in and on two

pages of poetry than in or on ten pages of any prose save the few books that rise above

classification as anything save exceptions” (GK 121). In this passage, Pound writes that

poetry is totalitarian, and in this regard resembles (or can resemble) Mussolini’s political

project. Not only is Mussolini a superhuman, he is a poem, a mode of discourse, one that

Pound explicitly analogizes to his own creative work. Pound writes in Jefferson that

Mussolini affected not only physical accomplishments, like the drainage of the swamps

in the south, but was also “AN AWAKENED INTELLIGENCE in the nation and a new

LANGUAGE in the debates in the chamber” (J/M 73). Mussolini is both the tale of the

tribe and the tribe itself. He is a language. He is the writer who writes a living poem out

of a population, a totalitarian poetics not limited to written and spoken language, but

nonetheless constituting a text—a thing to be read, a set of meanings to be solved in

equations Mussolini himself could rapidly understand:

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 80

… it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a

cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this

has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who

seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or,

still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the

general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it. (J/M

92).

Pound couldn’t have known that his “talks” with Mussolini, however imaginative and

brief the one most scholars have confirmed was, would eventually lead him to an actual

cage, and yet Pound intuited that support for Mussolini was an extremely dangerous trap

when he metaphorized his experience in zoological terms. Despite Pound’s own

brilliance, which he often emphasized in his professorly criticism, for him Mussolini’s

own intelligence is superior to everyone. But Il Duce was not exhilarated by Pound, even

though Pound was exhilarated by Il Duce.

Pound implicitly agrees with fascist propaganda when he figures Mussolini as not

simply a man, but rather as a text—an individual to be read and heard; interpreted for

literal and symbolic meaning, much like a book. In the opening of Jefferson And/Or

Mussolini, Pound criticizes Dante for his famous tiered system of meaning (the literal, the

allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical), but perhaps that very poetics Pound

mocks could be viewed as an analog to the ways he and the fascists interpreted Il Duce.

Mussolini literally drained the swamps, but allegorically he drained the metaphysical

abscess that had built up in Italy since the Middle Ages; tropologically he cleared the

moral morass out of Italian consciousness, accumulated from years of fiscal and social

watering down of the Roman heritage; and anagogically Mussolini gave birth to a new

world order. Il Duce’s actions, which are always the instant results of his understanding

of facts, suggests also a knowledge-component for Pound and the fascists, a two-part

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 81

meaning that requires a four-part interpretative apparatus to grasp. And in this image of

Mussolini, one that reflects his status as a figure interpenetrated by variegated media and

histories, and one that in turn acted on those same media and histories, Pound found both

an artist and a work of art. Bob Perelman agrees,

Seen through the lens of Pound’s faith, Mussolini the artifex, the artist of

the State, was a genius—a union of utter acuity and irresistible force who

perceived multiple perspectives instantly and had only to pronounce his

clear and powerful word to create social value, a new language, and a new

world (Perelman 29).

This Mussolini, Il Duce as the artist of history, is first present in Canto XLI, which

opens with his response to A Draft of XXX Cantos. Pound takes the Boss’s

glance at

the poems and quick response (“this is entertaining”) as evidence of his supreme genius,

not as his simple ignorance of English or ambivalence to Pound’s work. Pound moves

quickly from Mussolini’s reaction to the Cantos to the drainage of the swamps,

MA QVESTO,”

said the Boss, “è divertente.”

catching the point before the aesthetes had got

there;

Having drained off the muck by Vada

from the marshes, by Cicero, where no one else wd. have

drained it.

Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes;

Water supply for ten million, another one million “vani”

that is rooms for people to live in.

XI of our era.

Having defeated the land, Mussolini faces the equally difficult challenge of fending off

“the potbellies” seeking their share of the financial gain:

That they were to have a consortium

and one of the potbellies says:

will come in for 12 million”

The “Boss” was one of Pound’s favorite nicknames for Mussolini.

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 82

And another: three millyum for my cut;

And another: we will take eight;

And the Boss said: but what will you

DO with that money?”

The argument continues, and Mussolini stands by his question a second time, adding:

“You won’t really need all that money / because you are for the confine.” And so, as

Perelman has glossed, action and language combined in a single spoken word (confine),

and the men are pushed out of the frame of the poem, confined to the nothingness of the

space outside the poem—”magically quarantined” (Perelman 71).

Pound’s Mussolini functions similarly to Gentile’s, occupying a central place in

Italian culture, interpenetrated and penetrating its various discourses. And Mussolini as

this figure of discourse, like the others that people the poem, remains a thread (however

thinned) until the end, even though the epic-focus of the poem shifts after the Pisan

Cantos. In one of the last cantos, Pound, who no longer places Mussolini as emblematic

of good government, still privileges the totalitarian leader, the individual genius

dominating and making culture, as the source of good government: “The whole tribe is

from one man’s body, / what other way can you think of it?” (C 99). Taken with Pound’s

characterization of the Cantos as “the tale of the tribe,” these two lines elide him with

Pound most frequently uses dialect to condescend. Moneylenders, Jews, idiot

Americans and their World War II allies often speak in dialect, while Mussolini and

Kung and other “heroes” of the poem speak with both clarity and calm. Perelman, who is

especially sensitive to Pound’s use of dialect (much more so than any other commentator

I’ve read), writes, “As the Cantos progresses, accent, especially if ‘Jewish,’ will be a sign

of moral decay” (Perelman 66). As with the case of the famous “pull down thy vanity”

passage in Canto LXXXI, Morrison writes that Pound’s dialect and address is often

misunderstood. In his reading, the “thy” doesn’t refer to Pound, as is often argued, but to

the blacks soldiers guarding him. Morrison thoroughly parses the various lines as a

complex system of puns that is, in fact, critical of the racially integrated U.S. army

(Morrison 42-43).

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 83

Mussolini, Sigismundo, Kung, Adams, all of the heroes of the Cantos—emphasizing the

individual capable of making and remaking civil society in his image and his language.

And the Poundian hero, as Perelman writes, is always half between action and words, a

figure whose speech “is a punctual (puncturing) act, not a discourse” (Perelman 61).

Numerous individuals appear in the Cantos as capable of this kind of puncturing act, but

Sigismundo is the hero who most obviously resembles Mussolini, and in many ways who

reflects Pound’s idealized image of Il Duce.

The eighth canto is the first to feature Sigismundo Malatesta, the mercenary ruler

of Rimini (1417 – 1468) who built the Tempio Malatesta, and who then figures as the

poem’s hero for much of the first thirty cantos (Terrell 37). Pound’s interest in

Sigismundo begins with his patronage program, which he hoped Mussolini would

recycle—and, in fact, the character of Sigismundo is modeled after Mussolini. Perelman

writes: “Malatesta is a forerunner of the Boss with all the proper attributes: he has daring,

panache, and a passion for construction; he treats artists well and is ‘a male of the

species,’ as Pound said of Mussolini” (Perelman 34). Sigismuno was appointed by the

Pope, after a long series of conflicts that installed him as one of the most powerful

leaders in northern Italy. Pound first visited Rimini in 1922, five months before the

publication of Eliot’s Waste Land, which Pound references in the opening line of the

poem, and saw the Tempio Malatestiano, a cathedral Sigismundo spent his life funding. It

was at this time that Pound first encountered the Fascists, whose rule was still limited to

Northern Italy. In addition to being a powerful autocrat with a strong patronage program,

Sigismundo was a poet, and canto eight quotes some fragmentary verse (translated by

Pound) in praise of his mistress (Terrell 38). Importantly, Pound’s image of an ideal

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 84

leader always involves his patronage of the arts, and stresses Pound’s own conviction that

statecraft could only be perfected in a society with a healthy arts culture in place.

Sigismundo, like Mussolini in 1922, is a creative leader who faces enormous opposition

(“With the church against him, / With the Medici bank for itself”) who nevertheless

overcomes the forces standing in the way of progress in order to not only create good

government, but to create a culture of masterful art—emblematized in the Tempio, the

construction of which is the subject of the ninth canto.

Lawrence Rainey writes in his essay “‘All I Want to Do Is to Follow the Orders’:

History, Faith, and Fascism in the Early Cantos” that Sigismundo became a paradigmatic

model for Pound’s other heroes. This slightly oversimplifies Sigismundo and his peers in

the poem, but Rainey’s argument is helpful in that it proposes a reading of the early

Renaissance dictator as a hypertextual figure, much like Mussolini. Pound, in

Sigismundo, first tests his compositional strategy of introducing real life figures as epic

heroes in order to explore examples of nearly virtuous governments and their leaders as

an image for the present. Sigismundo differs from the others in that his abilities are

slightly more supernatural, and, as Rainey argues, resemble less a governmental program

based on abstract principles of managing human behavior (Kung) or realist responses to

the political and natural wilderness of a new world (Adams), than a Roman augury:

Sigismondo reads [events] through the prism of history, interprets [their]

significance for the present, and transforms [them] into a guide for

conduct in the future, doing so in a way that lends interpretation a

performative dimension within the ‘present’ of the text, turns it into a an

exhortation to resolute action in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile

reality. (Rainey 65)

Sigismundo is a leader much like Mussolini, Pound’s boss, translating his understanding

of events (most of which are occluded by preconception) into action that has a real

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 85

impact on the way the world functions. But as Pound’s criticism stresses, Adams (and

Jefferson) and Kung (a figure Morrison compares to Mussolini [37]) factor equally into

Mussolini, whether—as Pound is careful to observe—Mussolini is aware of it or not.

While aspects of Sigismundo resemble Il Duce, I think the more apt reading of the

Renaissance ruler would be as a still-born Mussolini, one incapable of installing himself

at the center of Italian culture (and world culture) because of too many external forces,

including a divided peninsula. Mussolini, in Pound’s writing, more resembles all three of

the central figures of the early cantos: Adams, Kung, and Sigismundo, embodying the

central characteristics of all of them—intelligence, strength against wilderness/disorder,

and a natural propensity for good government. In this sense, all of the figures in the first

half of the book join to form Il Duce.

It’s no surprise that these heroes of the early cantos would resemble Mussolini:

after all, Pound revised the opening of the poem after 1922 into what we have today (the

originals were written in the 1910s, and published in 1917 in Poetry), and began to

develop the project further as soon as Mussolini assumed power. While I don’t want to

overemphasize the degree to which Mussolini’s rise revitalized Pound’s poetic energies

with regard to the Cantos, it certainly activated his political mind, a part of him that was

inseparable from the poetical. After Mussolini became prime minister, Pound introduced

the epic hero strategy, which uses figures and locations from history to conceptualize a

potential for good government in the present, to make a “painted paradise” for readers—

however complicated that image might be (as I will discuss more later). In many ways,

Mussolini is not only a possible impetus behind the poem, he is a formal model—a figure

penetrated and penetrating, punctured and puncturing discourse and history through

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 86

action, figuration, and language who is “read” much in the way one reads a book: a

poem, in a sense, much like Pound’s Cantos. While Mussolini functioned as a living

hypertext, Pound’s Cantos operate with a similar stress on its own position as central

point at which numerous threads converge, unite, overwrite, and connect. (Pound’s

Cantos are so much like a hypertext that several websites online provide various cantos

as hyperlinked to the source material, historical and art data, that the poem refers to.)

Like a hypertext, which highlights moments within a discourse and allows a viewer to

temporarily (or not) defer and redirect their reading to another text, I argue that the

Cantos, in privileging Mussolini via direct representation of him as Il Duce and as the

other historical figures who are frequently (but not always) analogized to him, Pound

demonstrates a formal interest in Mussolini—not as man or political leader, but as text: a

poem to be read into/from history.

But the death of Mussolini, of one of the models of the Cantos, created a crisis in

Pound’s composition practice. In addition to his imprisonment at the DTC, the possibility

of execution as a traitor to the United States and the likelihood of imprisonment and

public embarrassment precipitated a major emotional breakdown in Pound. Whether he

went insane (as he said he did) or not is discussion beyond the scope of this paper

(though Richard Sieburth provides a nice summary of the doctors’ reports in his

introduction to the Pisan Cantos

), but it can be said with some certainty that Pound

began to seriously rethink his poetics in light of the end of the war. Pound wrote to

William Carlos Williams on March 31

, 1946: “(of course here there has been no

Sieburth: “Army psychiatrists argued that Pound displayed ‘no paranoia, delusions nor

hallucinations,’ and there was ‘no evidence of psychosis, neurosis or psychopath,” while

Pound maintained that detention (which he referred to as a “lesion”) “had caused him a

‘violent terror and hysteria’ [that had] resulted in ‘a complete loss of memory” (XIV).

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 87

cataclasm & there can be no understanding until a whole new means of communication is

built up—neath which weight I am crushed = I mean need of creating it.)” (P/W 222).

Following the war, and the death of Mussolini, the LANGUAGE that had authored the

previous two decades, and that had helped to author Pound’s poetics, was gone. The loss

of Il Duce meant that Pound had to re-strategize his composition away from the epic

hero-focus that privileged Mussolini and his government, but not before a meditation on

loss in the Pisan Cantos. While those poems are sometimes read as an elegy for

Mussolini, or an absolution of Pound’s faith in fascism, I would argue that the poems

elegize themselves, lamenting not only the loss of Mussolini, but of their own formal

directive. In the next few pages I hope to provide a cursory look into moments in the

Pisan Cantos that showcase the degree to which Mussolini was affected by the death of

Mussolini, and the ways this death impacted Pound’s thinking about his own poem’s

direction.

Sieburth writes that the “myth” of the collapse of the poet’s mind and of

Mussolini’s Italy is crucial to “an understanding of how the poem stages its theater of

memory—and of forgetting” (Sieburth XV). The trauma of the “cataclasm”—of the loss

of Mussolini and Pound’s own directive—is both dramatized and reenacted from the

beginning of the sequence. Canto LXXIV opens with the image of an “enormous tragedy

of the dream” slung over the back of a peasant, and progresses with jolts of language,

reference, and mournfulness that underscore the cataclysmic loss. The elegiac quality of

the sequence is first obvious when Pound writes: “Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano / by

the heels at Milano,” referring to the execution and trampling of Mussolini and his wife

by Milanese partisans. Having spent much of the past twenty years involved in

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 88

Mussolini’s Italy, the brutality of their death must have shocked and horrified Pound. Not

only did the world he had placed so much faith in collapse, but the author of that world

did too. He invokes Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” but offers his own experience—and the

world’s—as a correction to Eliot’s poem’s end (“This is the way the world ends / Not

with a bang but a whimper”):

. . . but the twice crucified

where in history will you find it?

yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper

with a bang not with a whimper,

To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.

(C LXXIV. 433)

The city of Dioce—Pound’s idealized image of the city as utopia—will not be built in

Europe, there will be no terraces “the colour of stars.” The utopian possibilities have

finally been destroyed. The potential for the West to swerve out from under capitalism

had been removed. Pound’s own poem has been turned on its head: whereas before he

highlights the corrupted histories of the past in order to understand the present and offer a

possible way out of it, now his poem is forced to contain, even be bludgeoned by the

contemporary disaster of history. Power, rather than order, has won: “woe to them that

conquer with armies / and whose only right is their power” (C LXXIV.483). The painted

paradise is smashed.

For Pound the emergent future will not be any better than what the

past has had to offer: “militarism progressing westward / im Westen nichts neues / and

the Constitution in jeopardy / and that state of things not very new either[.]” Already the

focus of the poem’s historiographical praxis has shifted—away from cooler analysis of

. For the rest of the Cantos, Pound expresses doubt as to whether or not a utopian

project is possible in poetry, culminating in the final section, where he writes “The

dreams clash / and are shattered—/ and that I tried to make a paradiso / terrestre” (C

Notes for XXVII et seq.822).

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 89

cause and effect, to a near frantic fear that history is turning against Pound—“when the

raft broke and the waters went over me” (C LXXX.533).

Even though a grander “larceny” than he expected had overrun Italy (C

LXXIV.455), Pound remains defiant, and encodes his continuing hope for Dioce in the

opening poem of the Pisan Cantos. The world he has placed his faith in has disappeared,

but Pound’s refuses to give up on a utopian future

300 years culture at the mercy of a tack hammer

thrown thru the roof

Cloud over mountain, mountain over the cloud

I surrender neither the empire nor the temples

plural

nor the constitution nor yet the city of Dioce

(C LXXIV.454)

While Pound had expected the path to Dioce would begin with Mussolini, it’s removal

from possibility doesn’t necessarily exclude the potential for another to emerge. Pound

continues to struggle with Mussolini’s failure to stem the tide, and many of these poems

vacillate between hope and despair for the future, creating an anxiety about the efficacy

of poetry that ultimately forces him to change the direction of the poems, away from

fascism and the historical figures that underwrite his image of Mussolini, to a more

nuanced, fragmentary approach to history—to paradise.

Canto LXXIV, like others in the sequence, moves quickly through Pound’s

politics, history, personal experience, overheard speech,

and languages. Inside this

The disembodied quality of the terse, colloquial language is jarring, as it must have

been for Pound in his “gorilla cage.” Throughout the sequence this kind of speech—

taunting, indifferent, comforting—cycles in, disrupting the flow of Pound’s voice with

those who are imprisoning him. When the poems digress on history and other “outside”

forces, they are returned to the cage, where Pound first began to draft the sequence. The

prisoners’ speech is one way that Pound begins to bid goodbye to fascist Italy, buffering

much of his political and historical flourishes. The language is often rough, spoken by

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 90

complex matrix of historical, political, and personal references, which often go

unfinished or are cobbled together with other thoughts and parts of speech, Pound

presents and reenacts the experience of living in the American DTC. After a brief passage

commenting on Ugolino, opaque references to friends and historical figures, then Eliot,

Pound writes: “I don’t know how humanity can stand it / with a painted paradise at the

end of it / without a painted paradise at the end of it[.]” In the aftermath of the war, which

so unseated Pound’s vision of the future, the possibility of both the availability and

unavailability of the painted paradise is present in the poems. The presence is two-fold.

As I wrote earlier, Pound seems to valorize “painted paradise” as positive. But there also

seems to be a discomfort at the thought of an artificial image before humanity, and

therefore an illusion. This must have been particularly difficult for a man animated by the

urge to translate ideas into action, who’s poetic and critical career was designed in part to

invoke action through artifice, hence Pound’s complex valorization of the artificial image

of utopia seems to rupture in the Pisan Cantos, opening up the possibility of its existence

and inexistence. If humanity were driven toward (and by) an artificial paradise (cosmic or

utopian) that may or may not be there, the war would have been totally futile. Pound,

who opposed war, supported Mussolini largely out of a hope that fascism would bring

about a better, non-capitalist world. The loss of this world seems to throw Pound into

serious doubt as to the effectiveness of poetry, and of challenging the capitalist system

and its endless wars, even if he is certain of the rightness of his convictions. As he

emphatically ends Canto LXXVIII: “there / are / no / righteous / wars.”

who seem as interested in teasing him as they are in helping him. Pound cruelly refers to

them as “shades.”

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 91

While the collapse of the fascist world was unbearable for Pound, he nevertheless

acknowledges the need to accept this end. However, the experience of the camp affects

Pound such that he introduces a new, more deeply personal layer to the Cantos. In Canto

83, he writes in a near chant:

Nor can who has passed a month in the death cells

believe in capital punishment

No man who has passed a month in the death cells

believes in cages for beasts

(C LXXXIII.550)

This canto is noticeably calm, especially as it prepares the reader for the final poem in the

sequence, where Pound salutes Mussolini and the other fascists. Its rhythmic flow is less

interrupted, and stabilizes to a degree of serenity. He writes, “There is a fatigue as deep

as the grave,” and later, following a digression on a peacock dinner in Sussex, “well those

days are gone forever” (C LXXXIII.553-4). Pound’s poetic logic frequently reroutes the

meaning of one digression to account for another, calling attention to historical likeness,

similarity, or difference; here it is easy to imagine that “those days” refer to the pre-war,

when Pound was most buoyant about the prospects of a better world, when a dinner of

this kind could be enjoyed. In his cage, nothing could be farther away. Pound’s

hypertextual impulse isn’t lost even as its living analog is, rather it shifts its focus toward

elegy, constantly redirecting the reader to the immediate past, the causes of the

destruction of fascist Italy (the poem is overwhelmed with names, quotes, and allusions

to various Allied persons), and to Pound’s own experience of the end of the war.

The final poem of the sequence, Canto 84, bids farewell to Mussolini and the

fascist world. The tone of the poems gradually shifts in the latter half of the Pisan Cantos;

the calmness of defeat becomes an element of the sequence, until finally Canto LXXXIV,

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 92

in which Pound signals the end of his elegy for Mussolini by bidding him a complicated,

multi-valiant farewell:

Under white clouds, cielo di Pisa

out of all this beauty something must come

O moon my pin-up,

chronometer

Wei, Chi and Pi-kan

Yin had these three men full of humanitas (blood)

or jên

Xaire Alessandro

Xaire Fernando, e il Capo,

Pierre, Vidkun,

Henriot

(C LXXIV.559)

“Il Capo”—“the head”—refers to Mussolini. Ronald Bush characterizes the moment as a

“bitter farewell” (117), but he seems to miss the other potential meanings of Pound’s use

of “xaire,” meanings I think he intended to be multiple and elusive. “Xaire” presents an

interesting tripling of meaning, as it can refer to hello (which doesn’t seem to be Pound’s

meaning), goodbye, and rejoice. Taking the last two as Pound’s intention, the defiance of

the end is clearest: as Pound bids Mussolini goodbye, he rejoices in him, suggesting that

these men were “full of humanitas (blood).” But this concluding celebratory farewell to

Mussolini is brief. Pound, unlike many others, has survived, and must return to his own

defeat, recording a conversation between Italians who discuss the Americans he heard

“thru the barbed wire.” The conversation is notable because it suggests that Pound might

beginning to soften his position toward his home country.

Pound approaches the

conclusion of the poem by quoting the famous muckraker Lincoln Steffens. He begins

“And then I said to the shepherdess of pigs: Are these Americans? Do they conduct

themselves well? And she said: A Little. A Little, a little. And I said: Better than the

Germans? And she said: Sort of.” (C LXXIV.560. Tr. Durbin).

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 93

with a conversation between Italians “you can, said Stef (Lincoln Steffens) / do nothing

with revolutionaries / until they are at the end of their tether.” The question, for me, is

how serious Pound’s tone is regarding Steffens. Pound has certainly demonstrated

throughout the poems that he is “at the end of his tether,” but the question remains (for

him, certainly) what that change will look like.

The death of Mussolini raises the question as to how Pound had to re-strategize

his poem after the war. While the cantos that follow the Pisan Cantos aren’t totally

dissimilar from those before them, there is a difference of approach that allows the book

to be divided somewhat between the Mussolini cantos and the post-Mussolini cantos,

especially as the poems move toward an increasingly fragmentary state. The historical

perspective, and the stability of the various speakers, becomes increasingly jolting, until

finally most of what Pound offers as a canto is broken language and Chinese characters.

On the page, the poems are less crowded with language. Pound’s commitment to

exploring the political and historical within the framework of poetry remains in tact, but

much of the politics remains considerably less polemical—or, at least, less obviously

disagreeable. The impulse to include (and refer back to) everything is the same, but the

drive toward a specific end is less clear, and the poem eventually lacks a singular thesis.

The hypertextual qualities of the poem no longer seem influenced by Mussolini, and the

links between discourses, cultural milieu, other texts seem more tenuous or broken off.

The focus, more generally, seems to be toward lyric beauty than a history of the world.

If this paper were longer, I would include an analysis of every book of the Cantos

following the Pisan Cantos so as to fully test my theory, but space is limited. I hope the

conclusions I draw about Mussolini and Pound suggest one possible reading of the

III. Ideas Going Into Action: Mussolini in Pound Durbin 94

influence one had on the other, and how that influence impacted Pound’s process and

thinking in the Cantos. It seems that a sequel to this paper would be an analysis of the

later cantos change their approach to history, and how the underlying praxis is affected

by the death of Mussolini. Whether or not Pound consciously constructed the Cantos as a

textual analog to Mussolini isn’t very clear in Pound’s writing, though I think there are

tacit admissions of Pound’s indebtedness throughout his work. While I certainly have

thoughts on Section: Rock-Drill De Los Cantares, Thrones de los Cantares, and the final

book, I hoped in this thesis to provide only a groundwork for later readings. My goal has

been to raise questions among possibilities, and to investigate potential sites where these

possibilities seem to be realized. I hope ending on a (brief) look at the Pisan Cantos, and

the way Pound was dramatically impacted by the death of Mussolini, might raise the

question as to how Pound’s poetics changed after the devastating death of Mussolini.

How does Pound rethink his praxis after its living analog is dead? The numerous ways in

which they did seem obvious to me, but in a Poundian pedagogical move, I’ll have to

leave it to the reader to discover them his or herself.

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 95

Ez nd Ends

Letter 1

Standing back of the line that divides you from me, I’m not sure if I want to

extend my hand to you. When I read you, you were never there, or you were there in the

shadows and refused to come out, only ever standing half in the light. Now that you’ve

arrived, I don’t know what to do, only what to say—even if in addressing you in front of

a group of readers I’ve done nothing more than ask them to adjust their seat in the

audience, to trade front row for the nosebleed, while you take their place and I remain on

stage. Of course, as you might point out, that’s not an entirely honest image of this final

chapter, that a truer portrait would acknowledge that the Ezra Pound I’m writing to is not

Ezra Pound the man or even Ezra Pound the poet, but rather is a distorted image of you,

one I’ve twisted such that you now resemble me. The “you,” which you never took much

interest in but has become an essential element of my own poetics, an isolated moment of

“us” as group and individual elided into a singular linguistic character—a figure of

individuals made to cohere as object an “I” addresses. For now I’ll stand here as that “I,”

and you’ll sit there as “you,” and we can be individuated in language as such so as to

make sense of this letter. But sooner or later, all of us will have to admit that there is no

Ezra Pound here, there’s only us, and the images of ourselves and others we’ve generated

out of text, into text. But before that I might stick my hand in your pocket to pull out a

poem I wrote. I might say to you, and to those sitting above us, “I don’t think we’ve met

before, but I recognize you.”

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 96

Your identity continuously complicated this project because you wanted, despite

your endless assurances of your clarity of thought and direction, to be complicated, a

figure between, within, and as a multitude of discourses—politics, poetics, histories, and

geographies. Your escape any attempt to recognize you as an isolated element, but as one

interconnected and interconnecting an indefinite series of other elements. I tried to pin

you down, but no fixed point, or point moving between fixed points, would suit you. As

poet in the afterlife of an epic tradition, reinventing a poetic model that seemed ill-suited

to the war, interwar, and postwar chaos of the first half of the twentieth century. Homer

wrote in order to explain the origins of their societies, the disparate threads that were

made to cohere into a single national or cultural identity. Virgil complicated that model

by introducing a degree of self-consciousness to the tradition, to the act of constructing a

narrative at the request of power. You re-imagined the epic as many things, but

importantly as a work that could realize the Homeric, the Virgilian, and the Catullan—a

textual object that could construct (or correct) community as much as it could emerge out

of it.

So what were you doing in Italy? Trying to find what out of your times? Having

read the Cantos in full twice, and parts of it many more times, I’m still trying to

understand what what is. The hard surface of the poem occasionally cracks, lets the light

of it escape (a favorite metaphor of yours—one that the poet Bob Perelman, a poet I

respect but whose writing seems fraught with too much personal disgust over the politics

of his poetic lineage makes a great deal of in his book Trouble with Genius) and get into

the eyes of the reader. It’s gotten into my eyes, but I can’t figure out what to do. I’m

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 97

trying to figure you out, Ezra. I think, having written and read you and about you, and the

political context that produced you, I’ve come close.

Love,

Andrew

xample: I remember first hearing a recording of a selection of Jackson Mac

Low’s Words nd Ends for Ez in the late winter, when I’d just started this

project, but had no idea what to write. In the unheated room I listened to Mac

Low approximate Pound’s voice through Pound’s own words, reduce him to the most

basic language, determined by a chance procedure that omits most words from the

original text, except those that, once a letter is capitalized, spell out “Ezra Pound.” It’s a

procedure that seems to me to be profoundly elegiac, a melancholy erasure of E.P.’s

sense and its occasionally toxic poetics in favor of a fragmentary language that

nevertheless spells him out. It’s witchcraft, a counter-curse. A cure. I could see my breath

as I sat still, waiting for the moment when the power of the performance would click.

Twenty seconds: click. I don’t think Mac Low is being esoteric or unfair to Pound, in fact

he loved Pound, but in erasing him he performs an operation that simultaneously reduces

Pound to his best and worst attributes: the enormous, uncontrolled ego that dominates his

work in the repeated permutations of his name, and the crystalline lyricism that almost

always, even when Pound is attempting a literalism, is fragmentary, abstract, and

beautiful. Words nd Ends for Ez breaks Pound down, tells his work as language rather

than politics, obfuscates the politics of the Cantos as truly secondary, even non-existent:

What lies beneath but a shattered paradise that cannot cohere? Mac Low reforms the

Cantos in the only way he can, not through an academic operation on intent, meaning,

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 98

and context (in and out of excuse or not), but through reduction, reviving him as a

performance in language. Mac Low spoke across the computer speakers not as himself,

but as Pound, or a vision of Pound, re:vision of practice that unhinged me, withdrew out

of me my own version of Pound as a mirror image of my own ambitions: a poet I came to

at eleven, wanted to be, and later rejected only to find that his work is absolutely essential

to my own, and I too had to operate on him in order to rehabilitate him and isolate what’s

of him in me. The point, I realized, isn’t to read Words nd Ends, which I’d tried in the

past but found I couldn’t “get into it,” though of course reading works too, but to hear

Mac Low read Pound, to generate out of such a fraught, yet demanding text another, one

of fresher intent, a channel into the past. That’s what we do when we write—and read.

And through Mac Low I met Pound.

oom: Then there was Arthur Wood, who lives at the end of Downing St. in

the Bedford-Stuyvesant, my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. On the red door

of his building, which looks either like a church or castle made of wood, he’s

painted the words “Broken Angel.” The building wasn’t build to “code,” and so the city,

which has spent the past several decades gentrifying and normalizing the outer

neighborhoods, has tried to condemn the building. It’s almost impossible to imagine

Broken Angel in the city, but it’s there.

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 99

(Figure 11)

When my friend and I walked down the street, which stops at his place before making a

left, it almost felt like the house wasn’t there before we’d started walking toward it, but

was sprung from the city spontaneously. A sign next to the door tells you to pull the rope

hanging in front of it and to wait for Arthur. My friend who took me to visit him, but who

had never seen him himself, had me pull the cord. Neither of us expected a man to

emerge from a window overhead, but one did. He told us he’d come right down. When he

came out of the house, he shook ours hands, introduced himself as Arthur, and told us

about the various battles he’d fought and semi-won against city building codes, public

officials, judges, lawyers, and mayors. He told us that only last week he’d spoken before

the Obama administration at the United Nations, which had offered to take up his case

before a world court. The room of mirrors at the top of the house was removed by the

city, but the rest has been allowed to stay. Arthur described it to me as a place where you

could go and see the city in all its angles. When an airplanes flies overhead, it’s projected

all over the room, appearing as though it’s going in multiple directions at once. I find this

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 100

room that no longer exists to be such an appealing image right now because it reminds

me so much of the Cantos. Both appropriate images, refract them, project them into your

space, and steep you in their curious, but confusing beauty. They both stand on top of a

huge body of work, build by a single individual opposed to normative culture’s standards

of design, and both Wood and Pound struggle with invisible, but worldly conspirators.

imini, where the Tempio is, where Pound first met the fascists, and

rethought the Cantos as Mutholini assumed power as prime minister.

and the front of the Tempio, Rimini

It will not take uth twenty yearth

to cwuth Mutholini

and the economic war has begun

35 via Balbo

For Pound, as I mentioned before, dialect is most often used to parody or humiliate the

opposition. But this particular use has an added layer that is less common in Pound, and

one that is suggestive of how he viewed Mussolini as himself a poetics. Within the

anonymous speaker, Pound couches a critique of Il Duce’s critics in Mussolini’s name,

approximating the dialect speech pattern of the critic with an obvious nod to the Greek

word µῦθος, which can be parsed to mean myth, story, or narrative. Pound uses the

anonymous speaker’s dismissal of Mussolini against him or her, underscoring his earlier,

complex pedagogical point in Guide to Kulchur that we can know anything instantly as

soon as we remove the misperceptive faculties, those mental abilities that for Pound force

ordinary citizens to misunderstand the world through false or teleological histories

propagated by those interested in creating a false image of history. In this moment,

misperception of a fact shows within the speech of the speaker his or her understanding,

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 101

even if s/he doesn’t realize it. Mussolini is the tale of the tribe of everyone for Pound, and

he emphasizes it by revising Mussolini’s name to include the Greek for myth or story.

Out of one man, the tribe. For me this is an amazingly virtuosic moment, one that

showcases not only Pound’s curious politics and his endless desire to outwit those who

disagreed with him, but also, whatever my disagreement with his fascism, his unique

approach to language as a thing unto itself, a mode of communication that itself is

hypertextual: an Italian name spoken by an English speaker with a lisp revised to include

a Greek word, a conglomeration that seems to point not only to the unified nature of the

line or its meaning, but also to the meanings that it borrows, revises, and is composed of.

poetics begins in community: maybe.

A poetics begins with the individual in community: certainly.

A poetics begins in the Idaho Territory, continues to New York,

Pennsylvania, London, Paris, Italy, DTC, through correspondence, interaction, jobs,

poems, positioning, arguing, drinking, meeting, going in many directions—the wo/man

of twists and turns.

A poetics begins with an “a” because it’s one of many, and if it doesn’t begin with

community, it begins to be community. It is my letter written to you, or you reading my

letter and writing back.

A poetics is an engagement, and we are always / must be engaged.

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 102

rojects, even senior projects, raise the point that there are no self-sufficient

objects, individuals, or texts, and everything happens in sequence and,

whether we emphasize the sequence or not, always refers in part to its

interdependence on a variety of sources and antecedents. I wrote this project after reading

Bob Perelman, who impressed me at first as a poet capable of writing about other poets

with rigor of beauty against beauty, not beyond remonstrance to those who had so clearly

influenced him: Modernism of bad politics. When I finally returned to him to write the

previous chapter, I realized he’s only half-right, his anger isn’t as productive as I

remembered, and sometimes even stands in the way of meaningful discourse on

meaningful things. Language, especially the language of others, is an awful thing to

waste, or make waste of without rigor of beauty for beauty, I’d say. We don’t just take

things apart, we put them together in a different way. Or else we go nowhere. So with

Homer we don’t just say No to his antiquity because it can be disagreeable or strange or

unhelpful, we absorb it and begin again, “Then went down the ship,” because nothing,

even bad men, is not worth saving—or rehabilitated. There’s a problem when that

impulse is translated into a pitiful forgiveness or apologia, the palace of academic

crystal’s refusal to admit a crack is a very beautiful thing, and tells us who we are. So

Pound is a fascist who did adore Mussolini, at least for a time, and perhaps even modeled

his strategy of composition after the formal principles that underlie Mussolini as a textual

figure, but that doesn’t make his work worthwhile, even gorgeous, even when it’s

chilling.

Serenely in the crystal jet

as the bright ball that the fountain tosses

(Verlaine) as diamond clearness

How soft the wind under Taishan

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 103

where the sea is remembered

out of hell, the pit

out of the dust and glare evil

(C. LXXIV.469)

The ethical procedure is admittance, and revision of opinion that incorporates

acknowledgement of Pound’s wrong words for real events, a nod to the fight against the

hurried capitalism that exploits the poor and seeks war to refund its staggering

“progress,” the problems of Pound’s racist critique, and generate out of that

acknowledgement a new ethical, or as Joan Retallack has called it “poethical,” space for

the work that promotes good out of bad, what I guess you could say is the right way for

the complex, sometimes mean, work to emerge in the new world.

ut of what space, and into what new world? Charles Bernstein, Pierre Joris,

Al Filreis, and Joan Retallack, in discussion at Bard on the Jackson Mac

Low poem I listened to with them, argued through Mac Low arguing

through Pound, generating out of the conversation a new, improvisatory space in which

another, accommodating poetics could be proposed for Mac Low and Pound as well as

those of us in the classroom. By procedurally erasing Pound’s problematic politics in the

Cantos, does Mac Low release Pound from them, draw attention to them through their

absence, or create another work entirely? Probably a combination of the three. Whatever

the outcome of the procedure, the impulse to do it in the first place is relatable. I too

begin to think read Pound with love, but a complex, sometimes tiresome love; not only

am I drawn to him in a kind of fundamental way as poet, I’m repelled by him—a

combined feeling that I suspect Mac Low must have felt for Pound. The desire to erase

him is just as strong as it is to write as him.

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 104

oZier’s cuRve he wAll,

Phin hOut exUltant

seeN impiDity,

Exultance,

aZ loR r-

leAf

Paler rOck-

layers at-

Un e deNho ia

“HaD Ever oZzaglio,

e tRacchiolino

iccArdo Psit,

lOve blUer thaN oureD

Euridices,

yZance,

a’s Rest,

use At P”

n Of trUction eraNts

faceD,

E tZ

e FRance

LAnnes Pire

fOrces,

a nUisance,

was Napoleon

l 22nd.

Ery iZation.”

deR ed TAlleyrand Political.

e, Orage id Up ter-

Night al-

AnD E yZantines

m pRologo

othAr.

(Mac Low 323)

What remains is a fragmentary poetry of a fragmentary politics, and the only coherent

thread is the sequence of capitalized letters that spell out Pound’s name, while most of the

other words have been clipped or broken off so that they’re meaning is no longer

apparent except in a few cases. For me there is something profoundly melancholy about

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 105

Mac Low’s Pound poems—to see the reduction of the massive Cantos, with all their

referential, opaque power that almost always defers its meaning, reroutes itself, playing

an allusive and elusive game with the reader reduced to a thin, almost spine-like column

of text is haunting, almost spooky in its concision. All of the links are broken except one:

EZRA POUND.

nder: On Pound. Or not exactly under, but between: Between: On Pound.

Over Pound: epanalepsis, literally, “to take up over” but also to repeat for

poignancy. Not again, but again again. Kenneth Koch, under Pound:

Then you shall return to this valley and teach eating

For who hath eaten phooey

Returneth not unto paradise

Dem mudder fuckers doan unnerstan me

Said the Princess Toy Ling A.D. 1922

Dey doan unnerstan nutttin but smut

That was the year the doves fell at Livorgno

(from “Canto CXIII”)

I cringe reading that poem. Maybe I could have been funnier in this project, but I don’t

certainly find Koch’s parody very funny. Pound has already repeated his antecedents, or

an approximation of antecedents, quoting source material, inventing/revising histories,

incorporating overheard language (or language he writes to appear overheard) to be an

Again, what historiography already does. To say a thing that’s happen in such a way so as

to emphasize its happened-ness. History is the same except it repeats everything you say.

Kenneth Koch, between Pound and me. The problem with Koch’s parody is that it only

half-understands Pound, aping his poetry through stereotype: disjunctive lyricism

matched with historical data and dialect, creating out of what’s already such a hard

surface a squishier one, a mattress thrown over concrete. I don’t get it. It’s not funny.

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 106

Mac Low, on the other hand, enacts a reading of Pound, doesn’t parody him or

approximate him. Words nd Ends revises Pound to articulate a position on him. For Mac

Low, Pound is a writer who must be revised, not parodied. Koch’s parody offers nothing

NEW, while Mac Low’s revision and repurposing does.

on-linear history, OK. Once I was dating two people at once, just like

Pound did, and when our mutual friend asked me what I thought about my

triangulation, I told him I didn’t think of it that way at all because

triangulation suggests some kind of coherency to the geometry of my relationship.

Coherency suggests a totalized system, one which refers to parts outside itself while

maintaining its whole: what Pound sought his work, like everyone’s, was curiously

programmed against, and the painted paradise he made of it seems to me beautiful

because it’s obviousness only became such when illusion was dropped, and the world

was revealed as a place without Pound at its center. The world is only itself at its center.

So the concluding swerve of the Cantos, away from a categorizing impulse, a totalitarian

drive toward the definition of the affairs of everything in every relation, is about re-

centering the world, which is itself an incoherent system that privileges randomness and

tension, even as it attempts to recycle its parts in a system that appears totalizing: Nature.

But Nature, capital N, doesn’t exist except in us: and Mt. Taishan is in Northern Italy in

the Cantos not as fantasy but because, for Pound, it is. We affect, and are affected, by

landscape, the endgame of which we’ve only just started to understand that we can

destroy. The world is not a place of narrative—it doesn’t care about your stories anymore

than it cares about keeping everything that’s happened to it straight. So what did Pound

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 107

find? He found the world in its emergent, non-linear, non-linguistic form. And then he

took a vow of silence for ten years.

own went the ship. And those of us onboard went with it. When I started

this project, I had no concrete idea about what direction it would take me. I

was interested in the ways antiquity influenced fascism, and in turn

influenced Pound. I was inspired by the Chaos & Classicism exhibit at the Guggenheim

in New York, and knew almost immediately that I wanted to write about this segment of

history, an era in the arts mostly forgotten (in art history the study of many of the artists I

briefly touch on at the end, and the many more who were displayed the Guggenheim, has

only just begun). I was interested in, as Morrison titled the introductory chapter to his

Poetics of Fascism, “Modernism for the other people.” What I didn’t anticipate while I

spent the last year writing this paper was the extent to which the past, specifically the

1920’s and 1930’s, bears some resemblance to our own time, especially as extra-party

elements in the American political system like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street

movements have become daily presences in my life. My adviser Ben Stevens saw similar

connections and, more frequently than the essay reveals, those connections were a large

part of the discussion during our weekly meetings. The question for me was always how

to introduce these similarities (between, say, the coercive, nationalist rhetoric of the

fascists and the Tea Party) without reducing my analysis to an alarmist elision of two

very different political moments, one of which is ongoing. And yet, those ghost of one

time haunts my own in my mind: distinctions between “real” and “fake” Americans; the

rhetoric of violence that ultimately lead to the attempted assassination of Representative

Gabrielle Giffords; the numerous rallies against an imaginary “elite;” the appearance of a

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 108

foreign-born, “faceless left” in conservative discourse. This conversation, these fears, and

these prejudices both pre-date, overlap, and continue beyond my project, but throughout

the writing of this their presence was felt. The underlying question for me was always

what to say here, on these pages, if anything. Is it my ethical obligation to comment? Or

should I pass over it, either allowing the reader to observe the connections for his or

herself? And regarding Pound, the largest question throughout was how, as poet, does

one fit into the times? These are questions that I will continue to struggle with, and I can’t

say I have an answer yet or will by the time of my board or after. But they are for me the

ghosts that haunt my research, and every sentence of this project. And I can’t help but

feel that I am almost always extending my hand to them at every turn, only to find

they’ve turned away. I remain uncomfortable with the fact that they didn’t play a large

role in the first three chapters, but as my own feelings (and my own expectations) of the

outcomes of these movements, especially Occupy Wall Street, which I have invested

some of my own time in, I am not certain I am ready to comment on them. But I hope

that the connections, the rhymes between then and now, were obvious to my readers

while they read through this essay.

Letter 2

27 September 1955

Brooklyn

91. ALS-3

“Useful”? alwus comes down “to whom”? I’m probably irreclaimable you would say—

And I’ll agree—in respects. Ain’t in my nature to circulate tho heaven nose Id like to

unite others in friendship, taking Baruch [Spinoza] to heart on honesty etc.

Louis Zukofsky to Pound

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 109

Ezra,

LZ’s response to you gives me chills, because his respect for you came out of a deep

unwillingness to attack the problem at its source. Being a Jew, and a Jew who felt such a

profound love of your work, it was difficult (but not impossible) for LZ to reconcile

himself to your anti-Semitism. Whatever attempt you made, and other writers promoted,

to de-racialize your vocabulary’s racist bent so that a word like “kike” isn’t a racial

epithet but an economic category, I think it failed. I don’t believe it. The Jews, you wrote

in the letter to Zukofsky I quoted earlier (his response is the epigraph to this letter, as you

might remember), favor usefulness, operate always with a “utility reflex” in mind, by

which you mean only what is of value is the value of a thing to promote at the expense of

others. But Louis Zukofsky, and countless others, are the FACT that negates your racist

politics—LZ who made no money, who was ghettoized by the establishment (by those,

like Kenner, who spent their lives promoting your work) until Robert Creeley brought

him out of the dark. You can’t forget, Ezra, that fascism makes no sense now and did

then only because the sense it made was self-made, no basis in reality except in things

and their exchange as a system to not be capitalism. I salute the impulse to fight it, and

today, in the time of Occupy Wall Street, limited or not, perhaps umbrella’d by the Arab

Spring, this means a great deal to me. I only wish the causes you saw—greed and

warlust—were not based on the West’s stereotyped excuse for its own bad behavior, the

exotic Jew from the East come to fuck shit up. The people who charge unfair rates on the

exchange of monies, who take advantage the poor, and leverage politicians toward war,

are not a race (and therefore, as the history of the world has shown, destroyable), but a

class, one that has been a constant since antiquity. The solutions to the problem won’t be

IV. Ez nd Ends Durbin 110

so easy to find or enact, and as you experienced, even in your wrongheadness, and as

OWS has experienced in the violent assault on the movement’s peaceful supporters in

Oakland, New York, and Atlanta, the one percent who benefit from the system at hand

will not relent in their will to preserve it ninety-nine percent of the time. Hard to stomach.

But nothing is permanent, and even the most powerful autocracy loses its ability to hold

on, and when the next takes its place, it is then that we can act to reform the ways things

are or unseat them before it’s too late, promote a cycle of leadership by which we might

all move in any direction we so choose, together at once. What do you think Pound? Does

the future tell us anything about ourselves, or does it always slip past us, just out of reach

to define itself as a potential we can never define? These are my questions. Write back

when you have the time.

XAIRE

Love,

Andrew

Durbin 111

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List of Figures

Fig. 1. Bertelli, Renato. Continuous Bust of Mussolini. 1933. Guggenheim. New York,

New York. Web. 25 November 2011.

<http://carolannestimpson.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/chaos-classicism-a-visit-to-

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Fig. 5. Undated file photo of Benito Mussolini. 6 December 2010. Web. 25 November

2011. <http://rt.com/news/russia-bans-mussolini/>

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Rome, Italy, late 1930s. Web. 25 November 2011.

<http://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=9551>

Fig. 7. Collage. Web. 25 November 2011.

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Angeles, California. Web. 25 November 2011.

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Fig. 9. Thayaht. Il Duce with Milestone. 1929. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporenea

di Trento e Rovereto Photographed by Harald Schrader. Trento and Rovereto,

Italy. Web.

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Fig. 11. Broken Angel. Arthur Wood. Photographed by Chris Wood. 2006. Web.

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